“Okay, okay,” I interrupt, and his lips twitch up into a smile. “Ugh, nerd.”

“Ugh, fangirl,” he mimics.

An impasse.

Down the block, Jess has finally climbed onto the food truck. The fans have gathered around her, and the Starfield song has somehow bled into the very fabric of the street. The street lights glitter off the tall buildings, green oaks lining the sidewalks beside lampposts and traffic lights. The streets are empty of cars. An older Luke Skywalker, peppery beard and shaggy hair, sitting on the shoulders of the tenth and eleventh Doctors, leads the singing, conducting the music with his lightsaber.

Jess grabs something from a green-haired girl standing on the hood of the food truck and hoists it into the air.

“Is that—? She has a megaphone,” I deadpan.

Ethan takes his hands out of his pockets. “We should probably stop her,” he advises, and begins speed-walking toward his charge standing atop the Magic Pumpkin food truck. I follow this too-tall boy into the sea of people, cosplayers and fangirls and fanboys and geeks and nerds, people pretending to be other people and people just trying to be themselves, and it hits me as we edge closer to the princess in a shimmering galaxy dress atop a food truck—

I think I might like Ethan Tanaka.

And as he bobs and weaves through the crowd, moving farther and farther away from me, I realize that he’ll be gone tomorrow, and I’ll never see him again.

Jess

“HARPER!” I SHOUT UP AT THE TWENTY STORIES of hotel.

My voice bounces back to me. I am too small and the distance is too large. I don’t know what I was thinking, to be honest. That I’d just come outside to her hotel, Romeo and Juliet style, and recite my heart’s feelings to her? And that she’d hear me?

I’d need, I don’t know—

“Hey!” A figure stumbles out of the back of the food truck and walks over. It’s the green-haired girl from the Stellar Party. Sage, I think her name is. She holds up a megaphone. “Wanna use this?”

“Yes!” I grab it and angle it up to the hotel balconies. “Harper!”

Her name booms across the hotel windows, ricocheting off the buildings in the middle of downtown Atlanta. I wince at the loudness. A few hotel guests open their balcony doors and stray outside to see what the noise is about, but not Harper.

Please, I pray. If impossible things do happen here…

I raise the megaphone to my mouth again to call her name—

On the fourth floor, a balcony door is shoved open and out steps Harper in her pajamas, a purple silk headscarf around her hair. “What are you doing?”

What am I doing?

I have absolutely no idea.