She pats me a few times, but before I can take much solace from it, she starts moving the stuff on my nightstand around with her other hand. “Maybe I could help you finish up your room,” she says.

“My room is done.” I didn’t know my heart could drop even further, but it does. I try to tell her how fucked up I am, and all she sees or acknowledges are objects out of place.

“We have to put the books in proper order. And surely there are some you’re ready to sell at Powell’s or give to Goodwill?” She frowns at the rainbow of books on my shelf, which I organized by color in defiance of the alphabet.

“I like the books how they are,” I say.

“But how will you find anything?” she asks. “You need them organized alphabetically. It won’t take long.” She stands up and starts thumbing over them.

“Stop it!” I throw myself out of bed and edge in beside her, enraged that she can’t comfort me without needing to put things in order. Why can’t she accept me as I am, even if that means messy or book-hoarding?

“I want them like this,” I say, and start yanking books off the shelves and putting them back all cockeyed and crazy. I stack some of them on their sides in groups of five and seven. “What if this is how things feel right to me?”

“Why are you being this way? I was only trying to help,” Mom says. There’s hurt in her eyes, and no sign she understands that helpful is the opposite of what she is. Because of her, home has never been somewhere I can relax. Something is always out of place, in need of cleaning, in need of checking.

Starworld was a much safer place to live than this. Zoe gave me the gift of somewhere to hide, somewhere to be myself without judgment, where mess and magic could go comfortably hand in hand. But now I’m back in the real world. No Zoe, no Starworld. Just my mom with her twitchy hands itching to reach for my shelf and fix things that don’t need fixing.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I say. My chest feels so tight, I can hardly breathe.

“What do you mean?” She blinks at me in confusion.

“I can’t go on being the weirdo with no friends who can’t invite anyone to her house. I need to be able to go out without you texting me three thousand times. How am I supposed to go away to college with you like this? What is going to happen to you?”

“You know your friends are welcome here,” she says. “And college is next year. We don’t have to worry about that right now.”