Free Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

afraid a fight would make him confront the truth about himself. And so, out of love, I refused to move out.
    “Then what did he say?” said Rena when we met at the coffee shop.
    “‘Today would be good,’ he said, but I’ve got several appointments I need to keep and no desire to disrupt my schedule because his royal Larsness asked me to. He can take the sofa, if my presence really bothers him.”
    “Wow,” breathed Rena.
    “I’m pleased with myself for refusing to cave in to his request. You should come on over after this.”
    “Oh no,” Rena said. “I couldn’t—”
    “Why?”
    “Not if it’s his place. You know. I think it would be awkward.”
    “Rena, it’s
our
place! Don’t be ridiculous.”
    I was dying for Rena to see how I had begun to enjoy Lars’s apartment. My stuff was in banana boxes, but I made use of every thing of his in sight. I wore his favorite bathrobe uncinched, the tie dragging across the dusty floor. I slathered myself with his sensitive skin moisturizer, heated his organic marinara in the microwave and splattered the sauce, used his electric razor and didn’t obsessively clean out my hairs.
    “Look, are you coming or not?”
    “I can’t,” Rena said. “Between The Pet Library and the pet-sitting, my schedule is crazy.”
    “I’m sorry to see you so distracted.” I pushed the check across the table.
    When I got back to the apartment, the phone was ringing. Naturally I pounced on it, thinking it might be Lars.
    “Is Lars there?” a woman trilled.
    I knew her voice: Chelsea, whose luckless experiences with boyfriends Lars had often, with too much sympathy, detailed.
    “You have the wrong number,” I said.
    “Do I? Is this seven five three—”
    “Did you say Lars? Or Louse? Or Lies?”
    Then I unplugged the phone—and kept it unplugged, except for when I wanted to use it.
     
    I’m not going to relate every detail of the siege. It was tiring, even with the advantages of the healing sessions, which increased my stamina, and made me think I could hold out forever, until the day when Bev Flowers stopped me in the outer room, by the serenity fountain, and asked me to pay off my balance. “Well, here’s the awkward thing,” I told Bev. “It’s Lars who’s been loaning me the money for healings, but now he went and changed his ATM number.” “I’m sorry to hear that,” Bev said, and that was my last alignment. In the end, Lars chose a cowardly route and called my mother, who could be trusted in a pinch with almost anything. She surmised that the affair between Lars and me was over and recommended that my lingering in the apartment be stopped. In her careful, experienced way, she took care of the peskiest details, even renting a van and helping me to pack.
    “Lars, don’t make this awkward,” I said when it was almost time for me to depart. “My mom’s outside. Richard is a good bird and I want you to keep him as a souvenir of what you and I had together.”
    We were standing in his living room, one of us with a calfskin bag jauntily slung over her shoulder, the other looking rumpled and depressed in relaxed fit khakis. I wanted him to take the bird, but in no way feel he was doing me a favor.
    “Well, if you won’t take him as a gift, then take him to square the count. I’m sure I owe you something for these months, and he’s the only thing I’ve got that’s worth anything.” I shifted the bag on my shoulder.
    Lars looked at the floor and shook his head.
    “It’s funny, Lars, I just got through telling Rena how different you are. I said, Richard’s like our child, Lars feeds him and holds him and plays with him, he would never just sail off like he never knew him. ‘I don’t know,’ said Rena. ‘You’d be surprised.’ ‘Come on, Rena,’ I said. ‘Think about it! Without Lars, whose glasses would Richard peck? I don’t wear glasses since the Lasik!’ And Rena said—”
    From the street came the husky belch of a garbage truck.
    I changed