“No, what’s it about?”

“It’s more poems.” Steph gestured to Diving into the Wreck. “Like these, but gayer. She was a lesbian.”

“Oh.” I had assumed she was straight.

“I tried to write some songs inspired by her poems. One of them turned out okay. When I was with Madchen, we recorded it on our EP.”

I could tell by the way she was downplaying the song that she was proud of it. “I’d love to hear it,” I said. “Is it online?”

“No. We burned a bunch of CDs at Roxy’s apartment and sold them after gigs. But tell me about your grandpa’s work. This is it?”

I plucked the top folder off the notes stack and opened it to show Steph, who came over to stand next to me.

“He was researching protostars. They’re stars in an early stage of formation,” I explained. “Joan wanted me to separate out his research from his letters. I like seeing his handwriting.”

“Do you understand all this?” Steph asked, gesturing at the math.

“Only sort of. I’ve taken calculus, so I can kind of see where it’s going, but I haven’t studied this. It’s pretty advanced.”

“Is that what you’re most interested in? Protostars?”

“I’m actually more interested in planets than star formation. I’d love to study Earthlike planets.”

“Like places we can travel to?”

“That’s the first thing everyone thinks of,” I said, smiling. “But we have to invent a way to travel a lot faster before we can do that.”

“Warp speed?”

I figured she was joking, but I said seriously, “Maybe, but it’s unlikely.”

She leaned against the edge of the table and looked at me curiously. “Let’s say we could go there—to these planets. Do you think there’s life on them?”

“Absolutely! We’ve already found thousands of planets—and only from a really tiny part of the Milky Way. There are so many possibilities for life out there—and life out there might not be anything like what we know on Earth. There are a bunch of telescope missions in the pipeline at NASA that are going to make it practically guaranteed that we can find an Earthlike planet with life on it in our lifetime. I want to be part of that discovery.” I stopped, realizing self-consciously that I sounded like a total nerd.

“You’re really into this stuff,” Steph said, smiling.

I shrugged. “Sorry not sorry?”