— I like their emptiness, the absences in them.

— That’s only because I can’t do people yet. I’m going to learn how to do them. I’ve signed up for life-drawing classes.

— Don’t put people in them. People only spoil things.

— Oh! So that’s why your poems are all about furniture.

Alex laughed. He hadn’t known that she had read his poems. He took this girl in properly for the first time: her stiffness and thinness, her evasive look, her dark-blooded lips in their asymmetrical smile so wary and withholding. He forgave her for preferring the kind of poetry that rhymes.