Unfortunately, there are no nearby supply closets in which to hide from the inevitable shame I’m about to bring upon myself if I try to respond. With my brain short-circuiting as I try to determine why she’s talking to me, my eyes drift slowly down until I’m staring her right in the high beams. And when I realize what I’m doing, heat rises into my cheeks until I’m sure they’re a shade best used to paint the ass of a fire truck.

“This is amazing, Sam!”

I force myself to meet her gaze, staring back with the poleaxed expression of a dead fish. Her eyes are an impossible shade between green and blue, dark around the edges and fading into a hint of unexpected bronze near the pupils.

It seems highly unlikely that Zoe would know my name. This is the girl with a transcendent voice who made half the assembly cry with a song from Les Mis in middle school, the girl pretty enough to coast on her looks but whose name regularly appears on the high honor roll, the girl at least half the school worships from afar. Thankfully, unlike those dickhats, I’m immune to the senseless adulation of beautiful people — largely because, with the exception of my best friend, Will, I mostly like to pretend other humans don’t exist.

“This landscape is so surreal,” she says, pointing to a finished canvas, seemingly not bothered by my corpselike response. “And the light! It’s amazing.”

I turn to the painting she’s talking about. It’s one of my smaller ones, about three feet by four, a landscape that kind of looks like the deranged product of a mind meld between Paul Nash and Bob Ross.

She gestures to another painting of a dragon playfully rolling on the grass in front of a castle, the background bedazzled with enough color and glitter to outfit ten marching bands. “This is yours, too? It’s so different. It reminds me of a fairy tale I loved when I was little.” She smiles at me.

Even though I continue to respond to her compliments with silence and twitchy blinking, she soldiers on.

“Is there any chance you’d consider letting me borrow the landscape? I’m helping with the set design for STOTS, and it’s perfect for this year’s play.” She tosses her dark hair over her shoulder, and a wave of subtle perfume hits me. It may be a rainy fall day in Portland, but the girl smells like pure summer — sunshine and citrus and verdant things.

“What’s STOTS?” I finally manage. They must be putting on an awfully strange play for one of my paintings to make sense as part of the set.