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She calmly dished potato salad onto her plate.

“Sure, you did. Everybody does. I used to think that too. There was this one afternoon—I must have been in third grade—I’d gotten another math test back with a giant, red C-minus slashed across the top of it.

Monique, she would have been ten, had just won a chess tournament and a tennis tournament back-to-back.

Sadie, who was six, had gotten the lead in a Christmas production of Annie .

I stared hard in the mirror at my freckle-splattered face and nondescript hair and accepted the fact that I couldn’t compete with either of my sisters—not on athletic ability, not on grades, not on popularity, not on looks, not on pleasing Mom and Dad, not on anything.

I felt loved and encouraged by them all, but I was bound to disappoint. I just was.”

“That sounds devastating.”

She grinned at him. “Just the opposite. It was freeing! Since there was no use trying to be like them, I realized I might as well be one hundred percent myself. It took a few years, but now I love the weird way my brain works, the odd things I notice that no one else does, the way I can get completely lost in something I’m curious about, and how easy it is for me to not care about the thousand and one things everybody is so ridiculously obsessed over.

” She gave her legs a slow stretch, careful not to unbalance her chair.

“To my surprise, I ended up an overachiever myself.”

What was he supposed to reply to that? That she was an overachiever in stealing houses? He shoved half his dog into his mouth to give himself time to think, but even after a good, slow chewing, all he managed to come up with was, “How so?”

“Well, how many people do you know who are truly satisfied with their life just the way it is, and without achieving some big, outward thing? Probably not many.”

He couldn’t help himself. The snark was just too easy. “So, you’re an overachiever in not achieving things?” Again, he worried he’d gone too far, but again, she didn’t get mad.

“Almost. I’m an overachiever in not needing to achieve things—in valuing my inherent self-worth despite living in a culture that demands constant achievement to earn externally-derived self-worth.”

Nico assumed this comment was directed at him, but he didn’t want to seem insecure by phrasing his next question that way. He flipped it around to be about her and her family. “Are you saying your sisters’ self-worth is false? They’re just playing the game, but inside they’re miserable?”

“Not at all. Happiness and self-worth aren’t gained in the same way by everyone, and it’s not a competition. See how quickly you went there? I can accept that being wealthy or famous or powerful makes some people truly happy even as I know in my heart that it wouldn’t improve my happiness at all.”

“But why not?”

She shrugged. “Too much responsibility. Too stringy.”

“Stringy?”

“Like, every time you want to do something, there’s eight other strings you have to pull first before you can even get started, and each of those strings has its own strings too. I end up feeling like a fly in a web.”

He nodded, thinking. “I see. So, it feels overwhelming. You’re obviously very bright though.”

“Thank you?” she said, making clear his complement felt backhanded. “Does it occur to you that my intelligence may be the reason I’m able to step away from the system everyone else lives by and create my own?”

“Um…”

“Because I did try living your way. I went to college, intending to major in English and art history. But somehow, I hadn’t understood I’d have to write so many papers on such meaningless topics.

Why do I care about the symbolism of loom weights in the private poems of eighteenth-century women writers?

I mean, maybe at some point I will be fascinated by it, but I can’t force my brain to be interested just because a professor requires it.

So, I dropped out. I did odd jobs for a while, feeling like a failure.

I had an apartment with roommates and bills and everything. ”

“Sounds stringy,” he said before taking his next bite of veggie dog. They were surprisingly good. Not exactly like the meat ones, but quite acceptable.

“You don’t know the half of it. My roommates were messy, and they expected me to pay my share of the rent.”

He cocked an eyebrow sarcastically. “The audacity.”

“I know, right? It was a fluke thing when Monique mentioned some of her clients would be grateful if I’d live in their empty mansions, keeping an eye on them while I also cleaned them. I was hooked. I started over. Lighter. Free. Happy.”

“Where did you sleep when there wasn't an empty mansion lying around?”

“With a friend or one of my sisters. It didn't happen very often, though, and I always gave their place a deep cleaning in payment. They started fighting over who would get to host me! And then…” She turned and looked fondly at the house. “… I found this abandoned home and made it mine.” She took a last swig of her soda and pushed her plate away. “But we probably don’t want to go there.”

Nico had had enough to eat too. He’d downed three veggie dogs without thinking.

He set his plate on the table and relaxed into his chair, giving his expanded stomach more room.

“No, we probably don’t.” The evening was going way better than he’d dared to hope, and he didn’t want to mess it up.

He was starting to maybe understand this strange woman better—or at least better understand why she seemed so alien to him.

After a short silence in which Ginny yawned twice, she asked, “But what about you? All we’ve talked about so far is me.”

“Oh, you know,” he said, stretching a foot toward the fire. “I just run around on the rat race hamster wheel looking for my next achievement fix.”

“Ha, ha,” she said. “No, really. Tell me something. It’s only fair.

” But as the last word escaped her lips, she let out the biggest yawn yet.

Her green eyes blinked sleepily. “Oh, sorry. This fire and my full stomach are getting to me. Plus, a certain song kept me from a full night’s sleep the last few days. ”

Nico hung his head. “My apologies again about that. How about I give you a rain check on my life story, and we call it a night?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. You go on in. I’ll put everything back in the truck.”

They both stood and stretched, and then Ginny turned to him, a shy smile playing at her lips. “Thanks for this.”

“Can we…maybe do it again?”

She rubbed a toe through the lumpy, weedy grass. “Um…okay.”

Nico watched her walk toward the house, his heart surprisingly happy. The sound of her footsteps woke the dogs, and Annie’s head popped up from the pile. She rose and lumbered toward Ginny, licking at her hand.

“You ready for bedtime too, girl?” Ginny asked.

The scene of the woman and the dog and the colorful house jogged something in Nico’s brain. “You remind me of Up .”

Nearly at the stoop, Ginny turned around. “Up?”

“You know, the movie Up .” But Ginny’s face was blank. “It’s about a house and a boy and a talking dog. I just realized how much the house paint makes it look like the one in the movie. Didn't you see it?”

She twisted her lips, thinking. “I don't see many movies…unless Sadie and Grant are in it.”

“You don’t like movies?”

“I do,” she said, shrugging noncommittally, “I just don't get around to it.”

“Well, maybe next time we’ll watch a movie then.”

She yawned so hard he could have counted to ten before her mouth closed. Then she said, “Since I’m not leaving, and you’re not getting inside, I don’t know how we’d do that.”

He snapped his fingers as if to say, ‘darn it.’ “But I know a really good one.”

“What’s it about?”

“The symbolism of loom weights in the private poems of eighteenth-century women writers.”