Once, when Rose was little, she remembered having a classmate who'd left early in the school year because she was sick.

Her name was Brittany Minkins, and she'd been diagnosed with cancer.

Rose remembered Brittany like no one else. Her hair was golden, her eyes a chestnut brown color that shined in the sunlight. Her laugh was infectious, and she came up with the best games.

Once, in second grade, Brittany asked if Rose would teach her how to do some of the math that they'd learned while she'd been away the week before.

Rose had asked her "were you not feeling good?"

And Brittany had said, "Yeah... I'm sick."

"Your dad should take you home," Rose had said.

"It's okay," Brittany had said. "Will you show me the math problems?"

And like that they had spent the afternoon, hiding away in the back of class, quietly going over the work that Brittany had missed.

Rose felt so much pride thinking about how much she'd helped Brittany, but later that month, Brittany left school for good.

In the fourth grade they learned that Brittany had beaten her cancer, that she would be alright, but that it would take a long time for her to catch back up in school. To Rose, who thought that schoolwork was the most important thing in the world, had wondered why anyone cared that Brittany wouldn't know how to do her times-tables.

Brittany was alive, and that's all that mattered.

These memories washed over Rose as she curled up in the large chair by the bookstore window that Wednesday morning. She watched Will as he swept and wiped down the counter. She watched him prep the money in the register for opening, eat a cold grilled cheese with tomato at lunchtime and wince at the taste. She watched him as he went along each day as if he should care about everything other than his sister, and it made her sad.

"Will?"

He glanced up from the book he was reading, "The Shape of Water", and his dark eyebrows raised up over deep blue-green eyes.

"Yeah?"

"How are you doing?"

At first Rose worried that he would take the question too personally and shut down or evade the question. Instead, he did not understand her meaning.

"I'm alright. Job hunt is slow going, but this isn't the worst place to kill time."

"What do you mean?"

Will gestured around the bookstore. "You know, Nate's? It's a nice place to work while I find the dream job, and I know he pays me more than he needs to.

Rose smiled. "Well, he hasn't had an employee in a long time."

"How long?"

"I'm not sure, he didn't hire anyone the whole time I've been coming here... almost two years now. I only started reading for kids this summer, but he's always managed alone."

"I'm not surprised. Not too much goes into it, when you don't count all the finances, the cleaning, the inventory and the clerical stuff. Otherwise it's just like living quietly in a bookstore."

Rose settled back into her chair and decided to forget about digging deeper into the subject of Will's sister.

"I'd love to live in this bookstore."

"I don't know about that," Will joked, his eyes trailing back to the pages of his book. "Sometimes it has a weird smell."

"I hope yer not talking about me, William," Nate snapped from behind one of the shelves. Will jumped a little and nearly knocked over his small cup of coffee, bought from the diner he used to work at. On the cup it read "Vinny's" for Vinny's Diner and Deli. It was Styrofoam and therefore not structurally sound.

Will hissed as a few drops of hot coffee trailed over his fingers as he saved "The Shape of Water" from being permanently stained by the drink.

"Not talking about you, Nate," Will reassured him.

Nate chuckled. "Good."

Rose smiled from her place curled up in the large armchair. "I still think this place would be the best to live in."

"Why, everything alright with your apartment?" Nate accused.

"Yes," she said. "It's just... you know."

The two men stared at her and waited.

"Lonely."

As if on cue, from the shelves above her came the meow of Quill, the russet, red cat. His tail trailed down just near the top of her head and she reached up gratefully and scratched under his chin.

"Well, you just keep visiting us and Quill here," Nate said. "You'll never be lonely again." And he disappeared behind the shelves.

"That's true," Rose said as Quill purred above her. "Sometimes I feel like I'll never be lonely… but then sometimes I go home and it's like…"

Will propped his elbows on the counter and rested his head on one hand, listening to her.

"It's like… I have two mugs. And four forks… and the TV is always on to make me feel like I'm not all alone. Which is ridiculous because Buyer's Energy Company is killing me with bills. I almost adopted a cat once, but then I worried I wouldn't be there enough to keep it happy. I don't know," her facial expression grew sad. "I guess I'm just complaining."

"No, don't," Will said. "It's okay to feel that way. I'm alone in my apartment, too."

"What about—" but Rose tried to catch herself in time. Will sighed.

"My sister stays at the hospital. She's always there."

"I'm sorry I didn't mean to make you talk about her," Rose said.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Seriously. It's only weird if you make it weird."

They sat there in silence for a moment.

"Okay, then." Rose nodded. "I'll try not to make it weird."

Her expression was dead-serious and so Will couldn't help but laugh out loud. Rose looked affronted.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry, but that was just so sweet and cute."

He kept laughing, but Rose's ears started to burn.

Cute?

At the same time, a customer walked in, and Will carefully closed his book on the bookmark and went to greet them. Rose stayed rooted in her seat. Her hand went still on Quill's chin and so the cat was pushing against her and purring even more insistently to try and get her to continue.

Sweet and cute?

Unable to stand the warmth on her cheeks, she reached behind the armchair and pulled out her backpack. She reached inside for one of her summer reading assignments from her graduate course and set to work on it. After Will was done helping the customer, she felt Will glance in her direction, but she refused to look up. Their conversation ended quickly after that.

When it was almost five in the evening, just around closing time, Rose truly was immersed in the book. At first it had been a defense against lending more to the conversation, but now she was so immersed that she barely heard Nate walk in front of her to the storefront door, flip the sign from "Open" to "Closed" and then cough in her direction.

"Ahem."

Nothing.

"A-ahem!"

Rose finally glanced up, startled. "What?"

"Closin' time, little girl."

"Already?"

Rose glanced upward at the clock on the wall.

"Yes, already," Nate said. "Gotta scoot. We've got cleanup and inventory to do."

"Oh," Rose said and packed away her things. Then she stood with the backpack on her shoulder and stole a glance at Will who was watching her carefully.

They both knew at that moment that her face was flushed red.

"Okay, I'll get out of your hair," she said, and quickly made her way out of the shop.

"Coming back tomorrow?" Nate called after her, but she merely waved behind her and unlocked the borrowed bike from the rack.

She started to walk away from the shop, the bike spokes making a click, click, click noise as she went. She glanced behind her at the park at the bottom of the hill and saw that the sunset on this gorgeous day was glistening along the park benches and ponds. She paused for a moment, thought about going home to her quiet apartment, and turned around.

Maybe she was running the risk of bumping into Will once he was done at the shop, but she decided this might be the best thing for her right now. After all, she hadn't gotten to finish her chapter in "To Kill a Mockingbird", and if she didn't get started on her twenty-page report on how to re-vamp her teaching strategies for her professor come September, she'd be screwed.

So, Rose turned around and headed for the park.

Jump City park was much bigger than she'd originally expected when she had first moved here. Rose was from a small farming town in Minnesota and so she hadn't been prepared to see fields and groves of trees when she moved here for school.

There were three duck ponds, a large fountain square for dancing and an amphitheater for concerts and festivals. There were several biking and running trails and even horses and carriages that pulled tourists around when the weather was nice. There were open fields for throwing frisbees or flying kites and having picnics. There were metal grills and picnic tables, and even once there was a traveling circus. In the spring, Rose had been invited to a concert in the park, but remembered declining for some reason. Lucky for her, there had been an attack on the park by a villain with electrical powers who'd blacked out the whole city that night. Apparently, there had been few injuries, but enough to make Rose grateful she'd stayed home.

Still, she wondered what her life would be like if she got out more, saw more things.

Rose clicked her bike over to a large oak tree with ample shade for the late afternoon sun and lay down her sweatshirt jacket on the grass. She took her backpack off again and sat down on the jacket. Then she pulled out "To Kill a Mockingbird" and set to work on the last few pages of her chapter.

By the time seven in the evening had rolled around, Rose had nearly completed the whole book.

Her parents had always told her that time could easily get away from her while she read, and when she looked up from her book after a child nearly hit her leg with a frisbee, she knew they were right.

"Sorry, lady!" the little boy in a ballcap called out. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!"

Rose smiled and gently threw the frisbee back, which floated gently over to the boy who caught it and smiled.

"No worries!" Rose called back.

"What are you reading?" the boy asked, but his father collected him quickly.

"Come on, Jack," the father said. "It's already seven, we have to go home for dinner."

"Oh, okay," Jack frowned. "Bye!"

Jack waved wildly at her, and his father awkwardly followed his son's example as they walked away. She waved back at them and stretched her back before glancing around the park.

Seven already? She thought. Better get going.

Part of her was almost disappointed that Will hadn't bumped into her, but she knew that was ridiculous. Not only did he live up the hill like Mike, he was probably off to see his little sister. Rose was being ridiculous.

Still… she thought to herself. Did he really say I was cute?

Rose frowned and shook her head. She pulled the sweatshirt jacket over her shoulders and recollected her things. There would be time for thoughts like that when she could think clearly, like when she'd eaten something.

When she was sitting at home alone with nothing else to do.

"Pretty pathetic," she said to herself. "Nothing to do and pining over the wrong guy."

As she packed away the final highlighters and sticky notes into her backpack, she accidentally bumped the bike over, and it fell to the ground with a loud crash.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Oh, for the love of…"

As she bent over to pick up the bike, she felt a cold chill behind her, as if the wind had suddenly picked up significantly. Just as she was turning around to see what it was, someone else in the park screamed.

Rose's head whipped toward the hill and the street where she was headed. The little boy Jack and his dad were sprinting at top speed, hand in hand, out of the park. She turned slowly around toward the rest of the park, which was now growing dark in the waning light.

Large trees cast shadows over her, and before she knew it, she was seeing a huge dust cloud headed toward her at top speed.

"What-?"

But it wasn't a dust cloud, she realized. It was a cloud of moths.

Giant moths.

Giant, angry, wild and hungry killer moths.

Rose mounted the bike immediately, her jean shorts tearing a little on her left thigh as they caught on a protruding screw on the bike. It cut her leg a little, too through her pants. She bit down on her lip and took off down the bike path and toward the bookstore.

The bookstore that was locked.

"Please, oh please, oh please-!" she screamed as she hopped the curb on her bike. Nearly thirty moths flew over her head and she jumped from the bike and ran up to the storefront of the bookstore. She wrenched on the door and thought she would nearly rip it from its hinges, but it didn't budge. The windows were dark, and no one but Quill the cat was left in the bookstore.

She yanked and pounded on the door, but the heavy plexiglass and metal doorknob were too much for. Then she whipped around the corner and made a beeline for Mulligan's pub. All around her and behind her were the sounds of people screaming, of metal screeching. She glanced up and saw that the moths were snapping through telephone wires and metal lampposts that tumbled down into the street, disrupting taxi cabs and commuters on their way home from work. A woman shrieked to Rose's right. She slowed for a fraction of a second to see the woman race down an alleyway and hide inside a metal dumpster, but the moths made short work of that, too. The woman jumped out of the dumpster and went running for her life in the opposite direction.

Rose's tennis shoes slapped the pavement in dull, muffled sounds that paled beneath the screams of Jump City citizens.

"Come on!" she screamed as she ran, urging herself to run faster. "Come on! GO!"

"Titans, GO!" came a cry from her left.

As if the ground had fell out from beneath her, Rose felt so stunned that she might collapse from shock.

On her left, running just on the other side of the street on the park grass in the form of a green stag, was Beast Boy, one of the Teen Titans. The stag snorted and charged past her, racing down the street and disappearing behind a grove of trees. Following him was a blue and white car that raced quickly down the street, and from it came blue laser shots that knocked ten moths at a time out of the sky and brought them back down to the earth.

Rose nearly missed Mulligan's pub when Babs, the owner, shouted her name and beckoned her inside.

"Rose!"

Rose dove for the door and rushed inside, slamming it behind her as Babs pulled her further into the pub.

"Damn, that was close!" Babs cried. She crossed her arms over her chest and said, "What were you doing out in that?"

"I was-I was at the park!" Rose panted. Then she slid down onto the floor and caught her breath. "I was just-just sitting there and suddenly…"

Babs nodded. "I know, the sky grew dark and we thought it was a freak storm, I boarded up the door as soon as possible, unless someone needed to get in, and then I saw you running."

"Thank you," Rose said. "Thank you…"

She lolled her head back against the wall of the pub as the sounds of a frantic hailstorm battered against the windows of Mulligan's. Babs patted Rose's hair and left her to go back behind the bar. In the pub with her were several young men and women sitting on bar stools and around tables. There was a pair of older men at the bar with white hair looking bored – longtime Jump City citizens. Then there was a man and his college-aged daughter sharing a plate of food, which had been abandoned as soon as the storm of moths had started. It seemed like everything, but for the conversation between the two older gentlemen, had stopped and gone silent.

"I saw Beast Boy," Rose said finally into the quiet bar.

Babs looked up from her place behind the bar in shock. "You what?"

"Beast Boy. I think Cyborg, too. He was outside when I ran in. It was… kind of incredible."

"Kind of?" called a young man from one of the corner booths "That is wild, man."

Rose smiled. "Yeah, it was. I'm surprised you guys didn't see him out the windows."

"To be fair," Babs said, pointing. "There's not much to see."

Rose looked up behind her at the massive swarm just outside the paned glass and nodded.

"Good point."

She rose from her spot and walked over to the bar. She didn't have to flash her driver's license for Babs to pour her a draft of hard cider and set it on a specialty coaster that said "Mulligans". She slid the cider along the bar, propped her elbows on it and said, "How's that handsome boy you always come with."

"Will?"

Babs grinned like a cat. "Oh, you think Will is the handsome one?"

Rose blushed. She'd been caught. "That was dirty."

"I thought you'd say, 'which one', but I guess I was wrong."

"Mike is very attractive," Rose blurted out. Then she blushed some more. "I mean, they're both handsome."

"Well sure," Babs said as Rose sipped her cider. "But your mind goes to Will first. I get it, he's got that look about him. Tall, dark and handsome. Trust me honey, we've all been there."

"I'm not interested in Will," Rose insisted. "They're both handsome and they're both very nice, but don't ready anything more into it."

Babs shrugged. "You love books, right?"

"Yes?"

"Good, because you're easy to read like one."

Rose frowned at her but then smiled good-naturedly. "Don't you have other things to do than gossip?"

"I'm a bartender, sweetheart. Gossip is all I do."

"I guess I'm not surprised."

"What is it you do, again? School teaching, right?"

"Soon," Rose said. She finished the cider and Babs poured her a second. "I'm going for my master's degree right now, but during the summer I've been reading at Nate's to the kids."

"What about your job?"

Rose blushed a little. "My, uh, parents said I shouldn't be working while I'm doing schooling. They don't think I need to have a summer job so they…send me money."

Babs gave her a sympathetic look. "There's no need to be embarrassed about that, girlie. Everyone's a little different. Some of us are blessed with parents who worked hard for what they have."

Rose played with her hair nervously. "Still… I think about Mike and Will who have to work so hard for themselves and I feel like a phony."

"Don't," Babs said. "Just don't take it for granted."

Rose smiled at her. "Okay."

The minutes ticked along, and someone played a song on the jukebox. Rose loosened up on her second drink but declined a third.

"I'd appreciate it," Rose said in a hushed tone after the last drop was drained from the glass. "If you would keep all this to yourself. Nate's got a mouth the size of the Louisiana Purchase."

"About which part?" Babs wiggled her eyebrows.

"All of it," Rose said firmly and smiled.

They sat like that for nearly an hour before the moths dissipated. Warning sirens from the Jump City Watch Service finally died down, and once the coast seemed clear, Babs walked over to the double doors of Mulligan's pub and unlocked them. She ducked her head out, looked left, then right, and then said, "All clear, gang."

Everyone but the two older men stood up at once and filed quickly out of the bar.

"Thanks for the refuge," Rose said. "I'll see you soon for story night, right?"

"Of course," Babs said. "Always here for story night. You've finally got one to tell."

"It was only for a second. I think that there isn't much left to say about it."

"Ruminate on it," Babs advised. "Stories age well overnight."