I’m trying not to laugh, but I’m halfway through my burrito and pretty much crying, as warned, so it might be hard to tell the difference. I message Sam between bites, while trying to act interested in what my friends are saying.

Me: *urges Humphrey toward the castle now that the world is burned down*

Sam: *lands him atop a spire from which the smoking Earth can be seen in the distance*

Me: *adds a slide to the turret and rides it into a window*

Syd nudges me from across the booth with her foot. “Zoe! I was talking to you.”

“Sorry,” I say, setting my phone down. “What were you saying?”

“I was telling Erin about that time in sixth grade when you broke a beaker in science and you cried.”

I laugh, although it certainly wasn’t funny at the time. The sudden hush after the shatter, all the eyes on me. I was mortified.

“Oh my gosh,” Erin says, making a sad face at me. “You poor thing. Did you get in trouble?”

Syd laughs. “No, Miss Grossman hugged her because she felt so bad for her.”

My eyes sting stupidly, remembering. Miss Grossman’s hug made me feel better, but it also embarrassed me and made me cry harder. “She was so nice.”

“Yeah,” Syd says. “Anyway, to get to my point . . . I saw her at Target — in the condom aisle!” She pauses to giggle, covering her mouth with her blue-manicured fingers. “And she’s now Mrs. Flanigan, and she’s moving to Costa Rica.”

“Oh, wow,” I say. It’s interesting, but not as interesting as Sam. I glance back at my phone.

Sam: *swoops in after you only to crash headlong into a rusty suit of armor* *stumbles blindly through the castle with helmet on backward*

I barely stop myself from giggling.

Me: *pries helmet off your head with scepter*

She goes off on a goofy romp through the castle with silly actions and mishaps, and I am so entranced that I all but forget where I am until I notice the time on my phone.

“Hey, I need to get going,” I tell Cammie. My dad wants to take us all to Bonney Butte for birding, hoping to catch some fall raptor migration for a last family hurrah. With luck, Jonah will see some hawks — maybe even an eagle or a merlin. I don’t even know what a merlin is, but if there is one, my dad will point it out to Jonah and they will both be overjoyed, and so my mom and I will be, too.

“Okay,” Cammie says, and she immediately takes over, as is her wont. She moves my burrito into a container and arranges the chile garnishes to rise vertically from the top like trees. Only in my mind’s eye, they’re not chiles on a burrito or trees in a forest. They’re Humphrey’s gleaming spikes.