I gave up on the search for the perfect fruit when I was a little kid, when I learned the difference between a drawing and the real thing. I learned that not every apple looks like that-- like the shiny red thing you imagined when I said 'apple'. I learned that I was writing my sevens backwards. I learned that walnuts crack and chalk dust can turn into mud. I learned that I have a minor allergic reaction to apples. That's... fine, I guess. I'll just find another way to lose my baby teeth. I learned that not everyone gets to be Sleeping Beauty on Halloween, not everyone gets to fit in the dress and put on the plastic shoes, and no one gets to fit on the magazine cover unless you're a good person.

Fast forward a couple years and I'm still trying to be Sleeping Beauty, minus the pink dress and the slim neck and the animals. Minus the Beauty, maybe. Minus the prince while you're at it. I'm telling myself I'll grow out of it, go eaaasy on yourself. I go too easy. I'm in a hole that's 30 missed assignments deep, and every 40 seconds it gets a little deeper. I'm deficient in vitamins and minerals you can't even pronounce. There are no vitamins in coffee.

The rain doesn't think I'm a good person, so it makes the trek to H-Mart long and muggy. I buy multivites there, because I like the idea of killing 8 birds with a once-daily stone taken before meals. I still secretly check the produce aisles for the perfect stock-photo apple, the kind that's so perfect you get two whole bites into it before you realize it's foam. I find nothing, I put my cart back nowhere, I see her. There's a girl with a bright orange umbrella under the awning. She's waiting for a car in front of the store to park so she can cross the lot. I'm waiting for nothing to happen so I have permission to make small-talk. I try to say something funny. I rock at being funny.

"Nice weather. It's like walking and swimming at the same time." I want to drown in a steel vat of boiling caramel. I want the last thing I feel to be molten sugar in my eyes.

She has mercy (good people love mercy) and smiles like the sun coming out. Like I don't know, I feel her shining on my face at the same time that I feel the rain in my socks. She smiles and it's the perfect orange. It's the one you see on the front of a Tropicana carton-- the bright orange on a white canvas. It's shiny and it's got a straw sticking out and one green stem-eye winking at you, and she winks at you, and then the car parks and she's gone, and you don't think about those lousy damn apples the whole way home. You dry off in the kitchen and eat a clementine so fat and well-loved that the peel splits like foil and unspools in one piece. My favorite vitamin is C, and the perfect orange exists in that H-Mart parking lot.