Claire gazed up at the stars thinking "Shouldn’t I feel like a beautiful person?". She lay on the freezing beach, where she had come to sleep. At first she thought it would make her feel like those people who drenched themselves rain dancing, or sat in trees to watch the sun set, but all she felt was the sand that was clogging the back of her throat. She sat up and brushed the sand off her legs, feeling she had come in vain. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be some inspirational character out of a Disney movie. Oh well. At least the stars were pretty enough.

She walked back inside her moonlit condo where her friend was asleep on the trundle bed. Claire collapsed in a cushy chair and stared at Emily, who was breathing in and out with a slight wheezing noise. Claire pulled off her sweater, imagining she and Emily having a picnic on the beach Christmas Day if it snowed, knowing it would never happen. Claire had invited Emily to come up to her family’s beach house for Christmas break because, although she would never come right out and say it, Emily was her best friend. It made her feel ashamed, as though she were dependent her. She was terrified that Emily might not feel the same way, so she just kept it to herself.

Claire chucked her sandy sweater in the general direction of her suitcase and went to the refrigerator. She picked through its contents vaguely, emerging with a cup of Trix bubble gum yogurt. She tried to quietly open the drawer of silver wear to pull out a spoon, but was to grab a fork since Emily ‘The Applesauce Junkie’ Redding had used them all.

"Sleep..." she muttered, as if by saying it, she might actually feel a desire to do it. She put the now empty yogurt container on the counter with the fork on top of it and walked back to the bed. While climbing over Emily with total disregard to the fact she was asleep, Emily murmured "mmm...go away..." and resumed her wheezing. While fairly certain this was just Emily telling a giant dream bagel to stop pulling her hair, Claire couldn’t help but smirk. I can feel the love.

Now I have to sleep. Ch-! Good luck with that. Then she did the worst thing she could possibly do: she thought in chains. Maybe I’ll tell myself a story...not gonna happen with Emily in the background...if I put a pillow over her head would she...well then she might wake up or die or something...that’s probably bad karma anyway…well I mean, it’s just breathing...hmmm...breathing...Oh crap...don’t think about that! Too late. In. Out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Think of something-breathe in-else or you’ll get-breathe out-stuck like this.

Panicked at the thought of losing the ability to breathe involuntarily she turned over to look at Emily and her squishy-sleep face. Quite frankly, her smeared eyeliner and generally disheveled appearance made her look slightly hung over. But the good kind...the kind where while you were drunk you started blasting Cha Cha Slide in the mall and were so entertaining in your pathetic stumbling that other people joined in; or the kind where you stole the school flag and replaced it with a flag proclaiming ‘FOR SALE’. Emily’s curly hair was all over the place, and when Claire rolled over, a patch of it was right in her face, screaming in the language of late night brain clutter "Eat me! EAT ME!" Wow...maybe that yogurt was expired or something... Claire tried to blow her hair away but only succeeded in getting some stuck in her mouth. So she dragged her lazy teenage hands from under the blanket and moved away her hair. She absent-mindedly started braiding it and drifted off with Emily’s hair in her hand, dreaming of hanging off an elephant’s tail as it carried her around the world...