Taranee is unusually distracted when she meets Irma at the university's quiet coffee shop. Irma smirks as her phone buzzes with text after text. She wonders if Julie—who is mostly emphatically not Taranee's girlfriend, thank you very much—is receiving a play-by-play of the tragic romance Irma's life has become.
"Aren't you supposed to tell me to, like, consider all the variables," she says, snatching Taranee's glasses from on top of her head, "to think practically, logically?"
"The logical solution isn't always the best one." She takes a sip of her black tea, studious as ever. Naturally. "David Hume said that reason is, and ought only to be, a slave to the passions."
Her eyes smart behind Taranee's glasses, and suddenly she can't pretend to be okay anymore. "I don't want to lose her, T." She swallows thickly. "I'm so scared."
It is a moment before she responds. "Did I ever tell you how I finally overcame my fear of fire?" Irma shakes her head. "It was after Yan Lin's funeral. I was walking through the park in the cold when I saw this homeless man bundled up on the bench under a blanket of newspapers."
She looks at her as if the story's ending is obvious.
"You lit a homeless man on fire?!" Irma squeaks.
"No!" Taranee takes her glasses back. "I lit him a fire to keep warm. Just a little one." Irma flounders and waits for the meaning to reveal itself. "I could have chosen fear that day," Taranee adds, speaking slowly, methodically. "I chose love."
"Huh," mumbles Irma. "So rather than mind over matter…"
"Love," she professes, fire burning in her dark eyes, "over fear."
Irma wraps her hands around her pink frappuccino and tries not to think about how both of those things can exist at the same time.