Hey, uh, you know. Um. If you’re alive, uh, call me." I looked at the screen and said, "It's Jane." I closed the phone, thinking, Lame. I am so lame.

The long flight from Georgia to England had been pretty uneventful. Exceept that Cal had sat next to me.
Which was fine. Really.
It wasn't like I'd been hyperaware of his presence and jumped the three times his knee bumped mine. And adter that third time, he definitely hadn't shot me a kind of disgusted look and said, "Chill out, will you?"
And when Jenna gave us both a quizzical look, we hadn't snapped, in unison, "Nothing!" Because all of that would have been weird, and Cal and I weren't weird. We were cool.

I walked across the two feet of drive to the lawn and stepped slowly onto the grass. It wasn't a wild grass, of course, but it was happy grass. Some variety of centipede, the mat
stretching across the open spaces, the leaves and roots and runners heavily steeped in time and good water and care and nitrates. It felt…satisfied, maybe, and very oddly, it also felt...snobbish, if grass can feel snobbish. My own mixed grasses at home felt useful, functional, and beneficial. "You are supposed to be eaten," I told the snobbish grass softly, "by
sheep and cattle and goats and geese. You are foodstuff."
"Nell?" Rick asked.
"Nothing," I said, walking away, the grass tickling my arches and pressing up between my toes. "Just talking to the grass.

I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it.

In the same way that the stewards of the Titanic were more concerned about the unemptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole in the side of the ship which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, I too was worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.