Chapter Two
Sparrow
“I just want to go to Paris and fall in love with a Frenchman. Is that really too much to ask?” I announce to the bakery. My bakery, to be exact.
A few customers look slightly aghast, but the regulars barely glance up. They’re used to this sort of thing—my “announcements” into the universe.
The overhead bell rings, and I get hit by an overambitious child running out the door. No more croissants for him. His mother (at least I think it’s his mother) looks apologetic before pushing me out of the way to catch her little escape artist. I nod my understanding and motor toward the counter where Lily, my best friend, waits. Her light-pink apron that reads pain of chocolate —a take on pain au chocolat —has seen better days. It looks like she was in a war with some chocolate this morning. By the smear over her eyebrow, my suspicions are confirmed.
“Why does chocolate hate you so much?” I ask incredulously. I wash my hands thoroughly and try to let the lingering mental image of Graham wash down the drain with the bubbles.
She sighs as she arranges the pastries in the front case. “It’s not my fault chocolate is out to get me. But enough about me—who was he this time?”
“Huh?” I startle. Should’ve known I couldn’t hide this one.
“Your face. You always have that distant look when someone, aka a man, gets too close to your castle.”
“I don’t have a castle,” I reply. I do, though. I totally do.
She arches an eyebrow. “Look, I get it. You have very specific dreams and ideas about how your life is going to go.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Don’t argue with me. Now my point is, you have ideas ... but you can’t plan your life like this.”
“I haven’t planned anything! Anything I’ve planned has been shot down like millennials and their side parts.”
Lily huffs but turns back toward a vat of melted chocolate, her light-blonde hair swept up in a high ponytail. It sways as she walks and always will.
We met in the first grade and have been best friends ever since. I had lost my mother a year before and had withdrawn from the world. While in the reading corner of our classroom with a book about an American girl who goes to Paris, Lily was lying flat on a beanbag chair, looking up to the ceiling while having an existential crisis of her own. I asked her if she wanted me to read to her, and after a slight nod, she listened. It was meant to be.
When we discovered I was named after a bird and Lily after a flower, she made me a bracelet. We even have tattoos. I have a small lily on my left wrist, and she has a small sparrow on her right wrist. Neither of us has siblings, so that is what we are for each other. She’s wild, and chocolate seems to hate her, but she’s family, and I don’t know where I’d be without her.
I always wanted to take over the bakery my father and mother had started—which my father ran on his own after my mother was no longer with us—and Lily loves chocolate. Case closed. There wasn’t ever much of a discussion about it except to decide if we were going to change the signs (we didn’t) or if we were going to update the aprons (we did).
Lily is the person I can talk to, or not talk to, about anything. Sometimes I think we’ve switched roles, and I’m the one now having an existential nearly-one-third-of-a-century crisis on the proverbial beanbag of life, while Lily is reading to me reminders of the dreams I’ve had and how to not lose sight of myself, even when all I feel are the burning coals of disappointment. Heaps of them.
“I think you need to tell me more about the man you met today.”
“Ugh. You would’ve loved him, actually.” Lily’s eyes light up for a fraction of a second before they dim and resume their “not interested” type of look. Talk about a fortress. She accuses me of such a thing but never goes out with anyone. And I would know—she tells me everything.
She raises her brows and waits. Chocolate drips from the whisk she is holding as she makes eye contact. This is one of her stare-offs, and it will not go in my favor. As much as I wish there wasn’t a little pool of melted dark chocolate forming on the industrial counter, Lily is focused, chocolate forgotten.
“He was perfectly ... fine. Just not the person I’m going to spend my life with.”
Lily chucks the whisk into the sink and glares. “And. Why. Not?”
Honestly, she’s terrifying when she gets into interrogation mode. I never had to worry about bullies or any other type of threat when we were in school with Lily as my best friend. Thank goodness I know which side of the line I’m on when it comes to her wrath, even if I do see glimpses of it every now and then.
I scrunch my nose and dip a spoon in chocolate. I’m going to need it. “He’s not French?” I say while I shove the chocolate in my mouth.
“Of all the ridiculous . . . ” Lily trails off. She rolls her eyes, and it’s not the first time. “You must know you’re not in an enchanted castle with magical objects wanting you to be their guest, right?”
We’ve had similar conversations before. And truthfully, I get why she’s upset. Only my parents could’ve known the truth behind why I’m so hopefully set on giving my heart to someone who understands me when I say I feel like the Seine must be a character and not just a river.
“Gah!” She’s got a spatula and is now stirring up the chocolate so fast I think it’s just to break her own record for attempts at chocolate destruction. “The most frustrating thing is that you’ve probably opened a portal with your words because your little French crush, Jacques, asked about you today . . . ”
I inhale sharply. “Really?”
“Yes, but don’t get any ideas. You did not orchestrate his apparent and, dare I say, new interest in you with your ‘man on the train platform refusal, ’” she says as her arms flail about, melted chocolate bits raining to the floor. How it’s gotten all over her arms too, I’ll never know. “Got it?”
I wince slightly. She’s not wrong.
Lily’s eyes are slits, but I see her soften. She comes closer to where I’m standing with my chin held a little higher than necessary. With her hand on my shoulder, she looks into my eyes, and I see the same friend I found in the reading corner all those years ago once again.
“Rory, you know I love you.” I’m Sparrow, of course, but Lily has called me “Rory” since we were kids. Somehow, because she’s Lily, most of the town has caught on and call me the same.
I wait for the next part of Lily’s commentary. There’s always a next part. I raise my brows and tilt my head to signal for the rest.
“But ... maybe what you’re looking for is someone to really see those broken parts of you and love you anyway. To be perfectly free, not perfectly French.”
I pull out a tray of cookies from the case and place them on the counter as Lily wraps her chocolate-covered arms around me.
“I love you too much to let you hide for the rest of your life.”
I feel tears brewing, so I keep pulling out pastry trays just to do something with my hands.
When I look back, Lily is staring at the tray as if it personally hurt her. Sometimes I wonder if her mannerisms have a bite simply because she’s hiding parts of herself too. I walk to her side, and she grins softly. There are bits of cookies on the tray from where I moved it a little too forcefully from the case. We each pick up a broken piece and take a bite.