“Slow down, and enjoy that stuff if it’s possible. Kathy doesn’t care what time I leave, only what time I clock out, and she knows sometimes I sleep here when I’m locked out, or have friends over. Everything’s cool as long as I clock out on time.”She swallowed that big bite she’d rammed in, and said, “Okay. Jeez, I’m so hungry, this stuff is good.”Ketchup for your fries, miss? I can recommend it—it’s my main source of vitamin C.”She smiled. “Sure. What does Kathy do if you clock out late?”Well, a couple times I’ve fallen asleep and done it, and gotten off with a warning. Eventually, though, if I made a habit of it, I’d disappear in the middle of the night, and never be seen again, and the only clues the police would have would be a few orange hairs and some enormous shoe prints. But for a few weeks afterward, all over the country, the Quarter Pounders would taste just a little bit more like Lightsburg, Ohio.”

“It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.”

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”“Waiting for the perfect love?”“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”“So then what?”“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”“Sounds crazy to me.”“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”

“What do you want a clock for?” “To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

“Of course I knew what time you would get here, girl. Just as I know what time Goodfellow will knock over my nineteenth-century French mantle clock.” Puck jerked up at this, bumping a table and sending a clock crashing to the floor. “To the second,” the Clockmaker sighed, closing his eyes.”

“If I knew how a lot of my relationships would have turned out, I never would have gotten involved in them... And I would have missed out on some of the best times in my life.”