“What the heck?” she says, squinting at it. It’s enormous — it must weigh five pounds.

When I see what’s inside, heat rushes to my face and my heart speeds up. Oh, Sam.

The bag is filled with what has to be a lifetime supply of Taco Bell hot sauce. On the outside, a label in her unmistakable pen reads, FUEL TO ANYWHERE.

Sam

The message from Zoe after my delivery might be my favorite of all time. Late Saturday night, long after the trick-or-treaters stopped coming, she thanked me for the artwork I made for Jonah and then sent a picture of herself sitting on her bed holding the giant bag of hot sauce. The smile on her face makes my stomach flip because I know I put it there. The caption reads: Ready when you are.

I have never been more ready for anything in my life.

I revisit the photo often in the following days, trying without much success to toe the line between fondness and obsession. But who am I kidding? That single delivery required me to take TriMet buses to three different Taco Bells, sacrifice my paladin armor to Will in exchange for free lamination at Copy Stop, where he works, and lie to my mom about my whereabouts for the better part of four hours.

The days pass in the usual flurry of classes and homework and Mom and Will and Starworld. I continue to dance around the second quest, because though I’ve worked out some of the details in my mind, I don’t want the magic of the story we’ve created to slip away. So as we message this week, I build distracting galaxies and planets and places where waterfalls of stardust run in sparkling reverse, where saber-toothed rats are the best possible pets, and where we can have cloudball fights far more fun than ones with snow.

My head is so far in the stars that on Wednesday, after I’m settled in art class, it’s not until I’ve mixed several new colors on my palette that I notice the folded piece of paper clipped to my easel.

Who would leave me a note?

I look around, but everyone else is minding their own business, or at least one another’s and not mine.

The paper is crisp and neatly folded, and when I open it, I barely stop a snort of laughter. I get a couple of disturbed glances from other students nearby who are confused by the strangled squirrel sounds coming from my normally silent corner.

Zoe has done the most spectacularly terrible drawing I’ve ever seen. She used a green sparkly gel pen, and it looks like something a five-year-old did with her nondominant hand and her eyes closed. I think it’s supposed to be a dragon, maybe even Humphrey, but to the untrained observer, it more closely resembles the love child of a wiener dog and a cactus.