The personality tests say she has a moderate preference for introversion over extroversion, but why, then, is she restless? She is supposed to be content to explore her inner world, the one contained with the confines of her skull. But at night when the streetlight shines through her window she wants to be outside, wants to walk down dark empty streets, through rows of sleeping houses, curtains drawn across their glassy eyes.

In the spring the frogs sing tunelessly in the pond down the street, the one tucked away in someone’s property, the one she’s never seen or even looked for. Maybe one of these days she’ll go searching for it and find something miraculous amongst the reeds and algae and mosquitos. Or she won’t go looking, because she’s too afraid that she won’t find anything miraculous at all. She’s read too many books, perhaps. Watched too many TV shows. Consumed too many stories to believe that rain is just condensation falling from saturated clouds and that the moon is a marble of grey stone lit by a faraway sun. So she listens to the frogs and resists the urge to follow their voices down sidewalks and through her neighbors’ backyards, because as long as she doesn’t find the pond it can be something more, something special.

From her stuffy bedroom she hears cars passing on the street, the sound like a wave crashing past, and she wonders whether they are coming or going. She wonders, too, whether she is coming or going, or if she is, as she’s feared, simply standing to the side of the road. Standing and watching the cars scuttle past like scarab beetles, beautiful and bright and always seeming to catch the light, even when the sun is busy on the other side of the world.

She’s heard that everyone is the star of their own story, but when she looks up at night, at a sky burned orange with light pollution, the stars are so still, and she wonders if they’re restless, too.