In a free-verse poem written in third person, a woman reflects on her feelings for her boyfriend. She is happy because he is happy, and she tries to ignore her feelings of emptiness. She insists that she does not want to ask for “more,” because it would be too much and would overwhelm her. She tells herself that he is enough and does not notice the distance growing between them, both emotionally and physically, as she moves away and puts “an ocean between their bedrooms” (140). He is kind and beautiful and “everything / she / wants / to / want” (141). In her diary, she lists the reasons why she should be happy, memorizing them so that she can repeat them when people ask her about her relationship. She feels like this is “drowning in all this / happiness” (143).

The chapter opens with an illustration of a notebook page filled with handwritten notes about various people. Elyse’s hotel coworker, Tabitha, has found her notebook and has read some of the notes that Elyse writes about the people she works with. Tabitha looks confused, angry, and insulted, and Elyse is horrified.

About Tabitha, Elyse has written, “Gymnastics and Ice-Skating. Limbs got too long” (146). Elyse insists that she did not write anything Tabitha did not explicitly say. Elyse then reminds Tabitha of their conversation about Tabitha’s past experience of performing both gymnastics and ice skating, which she loved, until she grew too tall and was forced to stop. Elyse then repeats Tabitha’s words verbatim, telling her, “You said ‘And that’s when I learned that no matter how good you are at something, being good isn’t always enough. […] There will always be factors out of your control, and sometimes, being the best has nothing to do with why it doesn’t work out’” (147). She adds that Tabitha’s words were wise and worth remembering.

Tabitha recalls the conversation, and her anger fades as her expression grows thoughtful. Elyse reflects that she takes notes about the people around her because people confuse and exhaust her. She has found that when she reframes her social interactions, treating them like learning experiences, she can manage them more easily. Whenever she starts a new job, the tasks are easy to learn, but the people and “unspoken social contracts” (150) elude her. So many things in life “Go Without Saying” (150), even though some people need these things to be said out loud so that they can understand them.

To cope, she learned how to be “Just The Right Amount of Observant” (150), which allows her to draw internal maps of people’s likes and dislikes—the things that are important to them as well as the “Dangerous Places” (152), or topics that she must learn to avoid. (Full-page illustrations on pages 153 and 155 provide examples of these internal maps.) Elyse notes that some people can walk through these “dangerous places” without maps or guides because they are equipped with the right tools to navigate them, but she is not. Unfortunately, even with her observational skills and her ability to draw maps, she is still not always good at reading and navigating the maps.

Using illustrated diagrams and numbered steps, Elyse explains the process of making a bed with hospital corners. The 10 steps include various sub-parts, in which Elyse comedically comments on the process. For instance, Step 1a, titled “Put a Fitted Sheet on the mattress,” is later followed by, Step 1e: “Why do the corners always smack you in the face when they pop off the mattress? It feels personal somehow…” (158).

The steps become more convoluted and reflective as she continues. In Step 5, she becomes distracted from the topic of making a bed and speaks instead of finding rulers to measure the corners. All the rulers must be located and placed in a designated spot, and she must tell every friend she knows where she put the rulers so that they can find them later and put them back correctly.

In Step 6, Elyse discusses paper airplanes. She was never good at making paper airplanes as a child, but her brother made the best ones and threw them around their grandmother’s house. She recalls the marigold color of her grandmother’s carpet. Her grandmother does not live in the house with the marigold carpet anymore. In Step 8, she states that “everything is really going to be okay” and suggests that the shift from being “Not Okay” to “Okay” often happens without one noticing (167). Elyse ends by admitting that “there is no step number ten” (169) but she believes that stopping at nine steps feels wrong.

In third-person narration, Elyse has a telephone conversation in which her boyfriend says he loves her right after she tries to break up with him. In that moment, she sits on the floor in her closet and breathes shallowly, trying to fight off a panic attack. She has been “waiting years to hear him say” (171) that he loves her, but it has come too late. Now, she says that he does not love her but is only afraid to lose her. He admits that she deserves someone better than him, but he insists that he is trying to be better.

She reminds him that he said he loved her once before, just before he disappeared for a year and left her alone. He broke her heart then and is breaking it again now. She thinks that this will be the last time she speaks to him, so she wants to say the right things. She says, “I spent months crawling my way out of the hole you buried me in, I’ve finally started to let you go, and you can’t stand it! You don’t want me! But now, you don’t want to lose me!” (174).

Suddenly, she is not sitting in the closet but standing in her shower, rinsing the shampoo out of her hair. Frustrated, she wonders why she cannot say these things when she wants to, but only to herself after the fact. She thinks about the conversation that she actually had with him and imagines saying, “Love doesn’t feel like this, and I will never let you make me feel like this ever again. I want to be loved by someone who knows how to stay and knows how to love me all the time” (175).

He asks if she is happy, and she says yes. He asks if she is sure, and when she says yes again, they both know she is lying. On a separate page with the illustration of a rotary telephone, the chapter finally relates the real conversation between the two of them; it is short and simple. He says that he loves her, and she says, “I can’t” (177). He asks if she is sure, she says yes, and they both say “okay” (177).

This chapter is presented in the first person. Elyse describes her experiences on the day after she breaks up with her boyfriend. She is still living in Australia with a roommate. She thinks that she and her boyfriend both wanted something more but could not give each other the kind of “more” that they each needed. Her roommate condenses the entire sensation into the phrase, “Newfound Singleness” (179). Elyse reflects that the phrase sounds magical but is actually sad and disappointing.

Elyse plans to leave for class. Her roommate points out that she is going outside in pajamas, but Elyse insists they are “house clothes” (182). Ignoring her roommate’s objections, she leaves.

Elyse arrives at her classroom building and runs into her friend and bandmate, Aiden. He remarks that it is the wrong day to attend class in pajamas, at which point she recalls that she and Aiden are leading the rehearsal for “the end-of-semester Songwriter Showcase” (183) that evening. A bus is preparing to take them to the venue.

Elyse runs all the way home, grabs new clothes, and brings them back to change into on the bus. She feels sweaty and tired, but at least she is properly dressed. On the bus, she realizes that amid the chaos, she briefly “forgot all about [her] Newfound Singleness” (185).

At the rehearsal venue, Jonas approaches. She has not seen him since their brief conversation in the grocery store a year ago. He has grown a beard since then, and she fixates on it while he talks.

Without conscious thought, she reaches out and touches his beard. Jonas looks surprised. Aiden teases Elyse about being single for only 24 hours and already touching other people’s faces. Horrified, Elyse apologizes, privately reflecting that she did not know she liked beards until that very moment. She wants to touch it again but suspects that there is a rulebook somewhere that limits her to “one Accidental and/or On-Purpose-Without-Thinking-It-Through Beard Touch per lifetime” (190).

To her shock, Jonas says he does not mind. He takes her hand and puts it back on his cheek to prove it. Stunned and overwhelmed, Elyse apologizes again, turns, and runs.

The rules mentioned in the chapter title are organized into numbered articles and sub-parts. Article I states that a person is restricted to one beard touch, either accidental or on purpose, per lifetime. That person must then issue an apology. Article II describes the form and intent of the apology, which should be immediate and profuse. Article III states that the “Bearded One” (195) has the right to forgive or not. Article IV states that following the single permitted touch, the offending person is prohibited from touching the Bearded One ever again. Article V adds the exception that under “rare and exceptional circumstances” (195), the person may be permitted to touch the beard again—if both parties have mutual agreement on it.