Oh, but really, truly, I loved Carolyn Keene. I loved Nancy Drew books. I loved the Dana Girls. And maybe I was too old for those books now, but I still read them, over and over. I didn’t want to get into all of that with Zeke. If he had never read The Member of the Wedding, then I might cry. It would make me so sad.

“I like Philip K. Dick,” he said, and I had no idea who that was. We were getting nowhere.

“I’m writing a book,” I said. I’d never told anyone. Not even my mom, who would have been delighted to hear it. “It’s like Nancy Drew, you know? But, she’s bad. She’s the one doing the crimes. And her dad is the police chief, but she keeps outsmarting him. And her sister is the girl detective, but she’s not very good at it.”

“Is it for kids?” Zeke asked, confused.

“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t figured it all out yet.”

“Well . . . cool,” Zeke said, and I believed him. “I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

“What kind of artist?” I asked him.

“Comic books,” he told me. “Drawings? Weird stuff, really.” His eyes lit up. He looked so happy. “And real art, too. Like, big things, complicated things. I want to make something that everyone in the world will see. And they’ll remember it. And they won’t totally understand it.”

“I know what you mean,” and I did.

“That’s what we should do this summer,” he said, like a lightbulb appeared over his head. He, honest to god, snapped his fingers.

“What?” I asked him.

“We should make stuff,” he said.

“Well,” I said, nervous, “I’m still working on the novel. It’s not finished. It’s just a rough draft, really.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “We can figure it out. It would be fun to do something together, though.”

“Just spend all summer making art?” I asked, confused.

“All summer,” he said. “What else were you gonna do?”

“Okay,” I told him, nodding. “But what if your dad fixes himself and you go back in a few weeks?”

He thought about this. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” he told me, and we both laughed.

And that was it. That was going to be our summer. If something happened to me, it would happen to him. The next few months opened up, turned shimmery in the heat. We’d make something.