“Tell me about this saga of suck,” he says.

I close my eyes. “You’ve seen my dad. You know the symptoms: rigid gait, tremors, loss of speech.”

“But symptoms aren’t even half of what something feels like,” he says, stretching out on my floor, his tutu sticking straight up toward the ceiling. “What’s it like for you?”

I smooth a frizzy curl between my fingers. “It’s like being a bee stuck in amber. I can’t move and I can’t think so I just stay frozen there in a world that is not my usual world of flowers and rainstorms and I don’t know—” I laugh, feeling suddenly self-conscious. I wish I could turn the lights off and the projector on so that we could see my fake stars, but you can’t just turn the lights off when a boy’s in your room. He might think you like him.

“Wait, say all of that again,” he says, tapping his keyboard.

“What? No.”

“Come on! Let’s just take some notes.”

I glare at him. “As much as I’d like to milk my dad getting sick for all I can, I don’t see getting an essay out of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to go there.”

“Go where?”

I roll my eyes at him. “What are you, a freaking therapist?”

He gives me a look. “Do you want to write this essay or do you want to maybe fail English and be kept from Senior Volunteer Trip?” I glare at him. “It doesn’t have to be about your dad. We can switch topics,” he offers. “What do you do that you really love?”

Besides making out and dreaming about getting the hell out of here? “Running, I guess.”

“Okay,” he says, fingers poised on the keys. “What do you love about it?”

“Um, one sec.” I slide the box out from under my bed and unfold something I wrote on a Gatorade wrapper after a run a few months ago. I read out loud: “When I run, sometimes it’s like the world opens up. I lose touch with my feet and my legs and I notice other stuff besides my boring old body. There’s more sky and more horizon and everything is closer but also more infinite. It’s freaking amazing, like the world is unfastening. Gene says that’s just endorphins and that’s why he runs too, but it’s not just endorphins, I promise. It’s not chemical or hormonal or whatever it is that our bodies give off and make. It’s wading through unsolved stars in my heart.”

When I look up, Brendan’s looking at me, and he could be looking at me. His eyes are all You’re a person with a heart and I have a heart too. I become very interested in my computer. Maybe he’s not feeling any of those things. I’m just saying he could be. Hypothetically.

“Keep going,” he says. “What are the ‘unsolved stars’ in your heart?”

“I think of them as alien familiars,” I say, blushing.