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latest name that they had agreed upon: Swollen Glands. But now, once again, Jeff voiced an objection. “I saw this sign, and it was really cool,” he continued. “Up in the mountains. They had them everywhere. It just said FROST HEAVES. Great name, huh? And, like, free advertising. Cool, huh?”
    “How about Watch for Curves?” Laura joked.
    “Nah,” Jeff said, serious. “Too limp.”
    “Well, there’s always Yield to Pedestrians,” she suggested.
    “There’s nothing wrong with Swollen Glands,” Phil said. “I thought of it, and anyway, the name’s in the paper. We don’t want to stop the swell of publicity that’s building. Right, Tracie?”
    Tracie didn’t have the heart to mention that one article was more a pimple than a p. 22 swell and that tomorrow there’d be another band in the paper. “Right,” she said, and caught Laura rolling her eyes. She hoped Phil hadn’t seen it.
    Luckily, Phil was trying to get the bartender to fix him a drink. He then nuzzled closer and whispered into Tracie’s ear, “I’m happy to see you.”
    Sometimes, Phil was a jerk. And Tracie knew he probably wasn’t ready to make a commitment, but there was something about his wild good looks, the way his hair brushed across his cheek, the way his fingers hardly tapered, but instead came to an end in flat, smooth nails. Phil was heat to her coolness and passion to her planning, and sometimes he made her forget all of the bad. Tracie responded to his whisper with a blush.
    Laura picked up on Tracie’s blush and shook her head. “I think I’ll try to buck the trend and do something socially responsible, like picking up a merchant seaman. Later,” she said as she boogied off into the crowd.
    “What’s up her ass?” Phil asked Tracie.
    She just shrugged and sighed. It was too much to expect her friend to like her boyfriend and vice versa. She turned to her laptop. She’d completed her profile at work and begun the Mother’s Day feature, but she still had some polishing to do on it.
    One of the things Tracie really liked about Phil was that he was also a writer. But, unlike her, he didn’t write commercially. He was an artist. Phil wrote very, very short stories. p. 23 Some less than a page. Often Tracie didn’t get them, but she didn’t admit that to him. There was something about his work that was so personal, so completely contemptuous of an audience, that she respected him.
    Although Phil had roommates, and had always had a girlfriend, Tracie knew he was essentially a loner. He could probably spend five years on a desert island and when a ship landed to rescue him he’d look up from his writing or his guitar and say, “This is not a good time for me to be interrupted.” He’d certainly said that enough to her, and she respected his integrity.
    Sometimes she thought that journalism school and her job had spoiled her talent. After years of being told, “Always consider who might be reading your work,” she found Phil’s commitment refreshing, even if he looked down on writers like herself who took on commercial subjects.
    Now she knew exactly who would be reading her feature: suburbanites over morning coffee; Seattle hipsters munching bagels at brunch; old ladies at the library. Tracie sighed and bent her head to get closer to the screen.
    After just a minute or two Phil nudged her. “Can’t you put that down and enjoy the scene?”
    “Phil, I told you I have to finish this feature. If I don’t get it in on time, Marcus will pull me off features altogether. He’d love the excuse. Or I could lose my job,” she snapped.
    “That’s what you say about every story,” Phil snapped back. “Stop living in fear.”
    p. 24 “I mean it. Look, this feature is really important to me. I’m trying to do something unusual about Mother’s Day.”
    “Hey, you don’t even have a mother,” Jeff announced.
    Tracie turned to Jeff as if he was a child. “Yes, Jeff, it’s true that my mother died when I was very