“It’s for a project. Friends work on projects together, right?”

Still too confused to process his use of the word friend, I ask, “And what are you going to be drawing?”

“I…” Nolan pauses for dramatic effect. “I will be writing.”

“Writing what?”

Nolan picks his cap off the ground and puts it back on his head, a bit smug.

“We will be creating the fictionalized shared history of Nolan and Amelia. We started in the middle, remember? We have to fill in the beginning.”

And like that, the absurd boy from the Orman room, the one with the flip phone, the one who reads to distressed girls until they fall asleep, has returned and stuffed the angsty famous author who is afraid of being seen into a car trunk. In the gleam of his eyes, I can almost see the boy that imagined Orman into being peeking out from the darkness of too-sad and too-happy music.

While I doodle pictures of stick figures frolicking through meadows of poorly drawn flowers and swimming in a sloppy square marked “public pool,” Nolan asks me questions and writes the answers down in his spiral.

“Favorite movie we saw together?” he asks.

“I don’t know. What movies did you like when you were a kid?”

“It has to be a made-up movie, Amelia. This is all made up. The movie has to be one we create.” He says this like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, fake fiction to accompany our fake history.

“Unicorns Rule and Werewolves Drool?” I suggest, and feel silly.

Nolan pauses. “Good. But what’s the plot?”

“Unicorns rule the world, and werewolves—with their poisonous drool—try to destroy it.” I try to make this sound as natural as his reasoning, and I must succeed, because he writes it down.

“Animated?” he asks.

I stare at him over the top of my spiral and desperately wish I could raise one eyebrow like he can. “No, Nolan. It’s live action, with real unicorns and werewolves,” I say, deadpan.

He throws a pen at me, which bounces ineffectively off my shoulder. “It could have been one of those cheesy B movies with live actors and CGI animals,” he protests. “Do you buy candy at the theater?”

“I sneak candy in my purse,” I say. “You?”

“Popcorn with enough butter to make it soggy.”

“That’s gross,” I say. I throw a colored pencil back at him for good measure.

Nolan looks at me sadly and writes something, shaking his head.

“What are you writing?”

“That you clearly have no taste for culinary delights and are showing signs of violence. Unfortunate.”

“If by ‘violence’ you mean retaliation, I’m okay with that.” I laugh.