"What are you doing?" Evan asked when Emily picked up her phone.

"Estoy haciendo la tarea para la clase de espanol." She abandoned her desk and moved to sit on the radiator underneath her window.

"Spanish homework. Really? I figured you more for a French girl," he said with a lilt in his voice.

From her improvised window seat, she watched two pigeons on the sidewalk outside. The boy pigeon fluffed his wings and bobbed his iridescent head as he followed after the girl pigeon. She was too busy pecking at crumbs to notice him.

She laughed. "French? Why? Spanish gets a lot more use in New York."

"Well your school is Notre Dame Academy. And you know what else the French are good at..."

"Cooking?"

Evan laughed. "Well I was going to say kissing, but that's another way to put it."

"So you take Spanish too I'm guessing, since you understood what I said."

"Yep. It actually gets a decent workout in the baseball world too. There are a lot of Hispanic players. I've made some friends at camp from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic thanks to my limited Spanish."

Emily looked up at the pink and orange clouds through the leafy branches of the ancient London plane tree in front of the building. She took a deep breath broadcasting her hesitation through the airwaves.

Evan's already deep voice dropped an octave when he asked, "What's wrong? Does it have anything to do with the songs we traded earlier? I was wondering a little bit about your choice."

Emily sighed again and adjusted herself so the coils of the radiator pressed against a different spot on her leg. "It's just that. I'm finding it hard to switch back and forth between worlds. It's like learning a foreign language. You can learn how to read it and how to speak it. You can even become fluent in it and live in a foreign country using it day after day. But you'll still think, you'll still dream in your native tongue."

And I already feel that way most of the time anyway...

Evan cleared his throat. "I can imagine that it's got to suck dividing your life in two. I'm not going to pretend that I understand what it's like having to deal with your parents' divorce."

"I don't know anyone that does. Other than my brother. Even my friends with divorced parents, their parents live in the same area. So they can stay at either house and still live their life. Same school. Same friends."

Emily noticed her left foot started to fall asleep and shifted again to let the blood flow back into it. She winced as her foot tingled with pins and needles.

Evan made a sympathetic noise. "I told you how I met R.A. Dickey. Well I've met a few other players over the years and read biographies. They always talk about living that divided existence of their life on the road with the team and their life at home with their wives and kids. They have their on-season life and off-season life. I imagine it's the same for touring musicians too. The one thing that they always focus on is that they do it for love. They're driven by the things they are passionate about to make it work."

Emily chuckled. "Not everyone is as lucky as you Evan. Not everyone is certain about what they want out of life." There was a minute of silence.

Great job Emily... Way to sound bitter and a little mean...

"That was harsh. I'm so..." she began.

But Evan interrupted, "No need to apologize. You're right. I am lucky. But you're wrong about something. You are certain about what you want out of life. That first day I showed you the river, you told me that you want to be happy."

Emily made a disgusted little huff. "That isn't really a precise direction in life though Evan."

He chuckled. "No it's not. But there are a lot of ways to end up there, which is the beauty of it."

"Are you always this optimistic Jersey?" she asked.

"Pretty much Brooklyn," he answered.

"It's slightly annoying," she observed.