We go about making everything more edible and less monochromatic, and I am stunned by her creativity when she mixes Diablo sauce into the blue cheese along with crumbled Cheetos and piles it onto the celery, creating an incredibly buffalo wing – like snack. We talk about plans for Friday while we munch away. I’ll meet her at the theater, and she’ll be right next to me through the whole play. I try not to be weird about it, but it’s hard when I’ve never looked forward to anything more in my entire life.

“How are things at home?” Zoe asks gently.

“The same, I guess,” I say. “You? Are your parents doing okay?”

“I don’t know,” she says, fiddling with a zipper on her backpack. “It’s pretty terrible.”

I nod, not knowing what else to say. “I wish I could help,” I finally manage. “It must be so hard to be separated from someone you love so much.”

She nods, and we’re quiet for a moment. Then she says, “That thing you wrote. I don’t know how to tell you . . .”

She must be talking about the poem in Starworld. I was so nervous about sending it, so worried it might miss the mark, that she might think it was silly, or maybe even that it might hurt her somehow. But I can’t bear her thinking there’s something wrong with her.

“She had to have loved you,” I say, feeling flustered. “I know she did.” I chance a peek at her, and I can see she’s on the verge of tears.

“Thank you, Sam.” She clasps her hands together. “That was . . . just . . . a really beautiful thing to do.”

I manage to croak out a you’re welcome through all the drunken frogs in my throat.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” she says, shifting to face me. “I turn eighteen on Saturday. And there is so much ahead of me that’s already plotted out. I know I’m going to Reed. My friends will go away to school. I’ll come home a lot on weekends. I’ll keep singing in college, and maybe I’ll even get to do theater.”

“But?”

She gives me a mischievous smile, but I can see she has serious things on her mind. “It’s kind of your fault,” she says. “Because of the poem you wrote. Because of Starworld.”

I think I know where this is going.