Jennifer E. Smith

Hi,' he says.'Hi,' she says back, and then to her great surprise, she begins to cry.'You know,' Nick says as he hands her a tissue from the bedside table,' for all this talk about how you don't cry, you sure are sprouting a lot of water.

As if it were far easier to start over completely than to try to put everything back together again.

they'd become unaccustomed to the brightness of their own city, and, faced with it now in all its intensity, they cupped their hands over their eyes as if staring into the sun.

Her eyes travel down to where he's gripping the handle of her suitcase. "What're you doing?" she asks, blinking at him."You looked like you needed some help."Hadley just stares at him."And this way it's perfectly legal," he adds with a grin.

He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.

Happy Graduation," he said."Now go get her.

But she knew it would never happen. She had no intention of visiting him there. Even if she were open to the idea, as Mom and Dad both hoped she would be, the mathematics of it seemed utterly impossible to her. What was she supposed to do, spend Christmas there and Easter here? See her dad every other holiday and one week during the summer, just enough to glimpse his new life in fragments, tiny slivers of a world she had no part in? And all the while missing out on those moments of her mom__ life__er mom, who__ done nothing to deserve to spend Christmas alone?That, it seemed to Hadley, was no way to live. Perhaps if there were more time, or if time were more malleable; if she could be both places at once, live parallel lives; or, simpler yet, if Dad would just come home. Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside of her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible.

Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?

Maybe the answer to all of his problems was nothing more than a darkened sky and a glittering city, a lofty perch above the world below. It seemed entirely possible that it was all just a matter of setting and location, and Peter wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.

That's the thing about flying: You could talk to someone for hours and never even know his name, share your deepest secrets and then never see them again.

There was a lump in her throat as she watched him fidget with the buttons on his vest, and it struck her as the truest form of kindness, the most basic sort of love: to be worried about the one who was worrying about you.

It took a moment to right himself, and he pulled his shoulders back as he regained his equilibrium. He didn't want to be half asleep the first time he kissed Ellie. For that, he wanted to be wide awake.

It was exactly as he__ thought it would be, like the first time and the millionth time all at once, like being wide awake, like losing his balance. Only this time, it wasn__ just him; this time, they were losing their balance together.

There__ a star in the sky that refuses to stay put, and Hadley realizes it__ actually a plane, that just last night, that star was them.

Suddenly, it seemed there were about a million times he was supposed to have kissed her, even without the benefit of a script, even without any sort of direction.

Even the not saying can balloon into something bigger than words themselves.

We have all sorts of words that could describe us. But we get to choose which ones are most important.

This," I say softly, "is going to change everything."I don't mean it the way I usually do.I don't mean that change is hard or scary, though it's definitely both.I mean only to say this: that sometimes, through good luck or bad, through curses or fate, the world cracks itself open, and afterward nothing will ever be the same.All I mean is that this seems like one of those times.