After wandering from room to room in the main party, Dustin decided to go check out the roof before he dumped his coat in Steven’s sister’s bedroom. Upstairs he found throngs of people smoking spliffs and cigarettes under heat lamps, a Ping-Pong table and an ice hockey table in full action, and a pop-up shop from Serendipity 3 manned by someone dressed in a penguin suit. Overwhelmed by the sheer insanity, Dustin got himself a hot chocolate and walked over to check out the view. Central Park was breathtakingly beautiful, still blanketed in white from the first early snowfall of winter. As Dustin stared out across the park, he couldn’t help but wonder if Steven’s dad had paid for it to snow.

Turning to scan the crowd of faces, Dustin didn’t see one person that he knew, and he realized the only people who had spoken to him since arriving were paid waitstaff. He made the decision, after finishing his hot chocolate, to leave before Steven even knew he had shown up. This party was obviously not his scene and these were not his people, and admitting this allowed him to finally relax. When Dustin checked the time on his iPhone, he saw an alert reminding him that OSIRIS-REx was going into orbit around the asteroid Bennu, and even though this was happening 70 million miles away he looked up anyway and found the night sky to be quite calming. He was gazing upward when he heard a sweet voice ask him what he was looking at with such fierce concentration.

When he looked down to see who had spoken, his first thought was that he had gotten a contact high from mistakenly walking into the kitchen pantry earlier, which was being hotboxed by three Dalton seniors, because the girl standing before him looked like a blond angel, otherworldly and ethereal, sparkling in a silver dress with a pale pink pashmina wrapped around her shoulders to cover her wings.

As a man of reason Dustin did not believe in the phenomenon known as “love at first sight,” but in that moment it absolutely happened to him. He spoke to this gorgeous girl about how he had the New York Times Astronomy and Space calendar alerts on his phone and how he had just received a notification, and she told him that she never really “got the whole stargazing thing” until she spent a year living out West where there were no tall buildings and the sky was bigger than she ever believed possible, chock-full of a zillion stars. Dustin adored her use of “chock-full” and how she guilessly admitted she hadn’t understood that bright city lights were the reason why she never saw the stars in Manhattan.