Page 13 of The Serendipity

“Hey,” she says distractedly after the first ring. From the windblown background noises, I can picture exactly where she is.

“You still up there, planting flowers in the dark?”

The rooftop garden of The Serendipity is as much Sophie’s place as the commercial kitchen downstairs is mine.

She snorts. “Where else would I be?”

“I don’t know—maybe your apartment? Or hanging out with Peter?”

Peter is Sophie’s other best friend. I’m not sure whyjusta friend since he’s super cute and a really decent guy, but bothof them are insistent on the platonic thing. There’s a muffled sound, and I imagine her shoulder pressing the phone to her ear while she drags a trowel through fresh dirt. Since winter is just releasing its clutches to make room for spring, Sophie is more likely covering the flower beds with sheets, whispering sweet nothings to her baby buds.

“You should pitch a tent and live up there with your plant friends,” I suggest.

“Now you’re making me sound ridiculous. Crazy Plant Lady, living on the roof with all my babies.”

Her joking words strike a little too close to my current situation of Crazy Closet Lady, teleporting through the building.

“Wait—do you think I’m a Crazy Plant Lady?” Sophie asks.

“No! Absolutely not.”

“Then why are you so quiet?”

“I just had an incident.”

“An incident, huh? Sounds serious. I’ll come down. Do you have any icing?”

“Duh.”

“Be right there.” And without a goodbye or waiting for a response, she hangs up.

In an age when most people treat phone calls like venomous snakes, I’m so glad I still have Sophie, who, like me, prefers to use the phone for its primary function. But when the conversation is done, she sees no need to put the frilly bow of a goodbye on it. She just ends the call. I admire that about her. She’s the most decisive person I’ve ever known.

I tend to land on the other side.Faron the other side. While Sophie’s decisions fall as swiftly as a guillotine blade, I tend to let things go on and on, hoping conflicts and things I don’t like will just resolve on their own.

A perfect example is my last relationship. Which I should have ended months before my latest failure of a datingexperiment, Paul, finally got exasperated with my complete passivity and put us both out of our misery.

I keep hoping Sophie’s decisiveness will rub off on me. So far, no luck.

I unlock my door and leave it cracked for Soph, then root around in my fridge. I almost always have a container of royal icing on hand, along with broken sugar cookie pieces. They are helpful if I want to practice technique—or to feed my best friend.

Sophie and I first met almost exactly two years ago in The Serendipity’s courtyard. It was the kind of early spring day so sunny and so glorious that residents came stumbling out of the building like bears awakening from hibernation. In our case, it was more like human beings to a swimming pool.

The weather wasn’t quite warm enough to swim, but the lounge chairs quickly filled up with people savoring the weather.

Sophie took the chair beside me and asked if I liked the book I was reading. It was historical fiction—the kind showing a woman’s back on the cover with planes flying overhead. Award-winning, from the gold seal on the cover. I’m sure it was a lovely book. But every time I picked it up, I hated reading just a little bit more. On the plus side, it was more helpful than melatonin for falling asleep at night.

“It’s well-written,” I answered after a moment of trying to remember which war the book was even about.

Sophie rolled her eyes, snatched the book from my hands, and rooted around in her bag until she pulled out one with a sword and shiny gold lettering on the front.

“Try this.”

I frowned. “I don’t read fantasy.”

She only hummed. “Just read the first chapter. If you don’t like it, I’ll give back the book that’s clearly boring you to tears.”

I read the first chapter. And I didn’t come up for air until almost an hour later to see Sophie grinning at me. “Told you.”

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