The apartment is a mess. The girl keeps people away, shuns friends and potential lovers, dissuades family from visiting, all because Cleaning Up is a task better left to men and women holier than her. She has been Cleaning Up her apartment for the past seventeen months; she has lived in her apartment for the past eighteen. The girl walks up the steps to her apartment (having passed through the lobby that holds the once-was-a-fountain that is now a bed of woodchips and fake plants under a mildew-encrusted skylight) and hears the sounds of dishes tinkling as she fumbles her keys into the lock. She pushes the door open and her kitty cat (her name is Lola) sits in the entryway unconcerned. The tinkling of the dishes is louder now, and the running of the water can also be heard.

"Um," the girl says. Then, "hello?"

She hears whistling. She walks in, closes the door behind her in case the cat (Lola) tries to escape and explore the wood chips and fake plants fountain below. She walks further into the apartment, which she notices now has stacks of magazines and compact discs in their cases, where previously there was a mish-mash of periodicals (the subscriptions to which had long since expired) and cd's on the floor, face down, the cases somewhere unknown.

She turns the corner, passes through the doorway that branches in three new directions, left to the bathroom (which gleams in a way it did not when she left for the day, which was not at all), right to the bedroom (the door to which is closed) and straight ahead to the kitchen. In the kitchen is the boy from space, arms covered in suds to the elbows, a stack of precariously leaning clean dishes to his left, shoes still missing. He whistles, looks up to the girl, and smiles. "Hi there," he beams. "Lots of plates here!"