“Come back with me to New York.”

“And . . . do what?”

He steeled himself. “And finish your degree.”

“What?”

“Listen, I’ve been talking to the dean of admissions at Columbia—”

“Wait, you know the dean of admissions at Columbia?”

“Yeah, I know everybody. Look, here’s the deal; we are a little past deadline for fall admissions, but I think with some elbow grease and some nepotism and all things considered . . .”

She stared at him, her mouth hanging open like a fish’s. “Kaveh—”

“Well, I can’t say anything officially, because technically, you still need to actually apply, but I submitted your Pershing Square essay—”

“That’s why you had me write those?”

“—and he unofficially told me, you’re in for fall semester.”

She’d have backed away from him if there hadn’t been a tree trunk in the way. “How the hell am I going to afford Columbia?”

Kaveh took a step back, waiting for her to get it. “You’ll get need-based scholarships.”

She shook her head like a pendulum.

He gestured to himself. “I can provide need-based scholarships.”

“Why?”

“Because you could have a profound effect on the world! You already have had a profound effect on the world! You have a tremendous opportunity. You could actually help all of humanity.”

“What, by going to Columbia?”

“No, Columbia is a step. Life is a series of steps. This is one of them.”

The pendulum of her head swayed faster, and her shocked, defensive expression turned melancholy. “I can’t leave him.”

Kaveh slapped his hands to his face and groaned into them. “You cannot spend your life waiting around on him!”

“My connection to Ampersand is way more potentially consequential than me being one of the shit million kids going to an Ivy.”

“And you don’t have to lose that because you go to an Ivy! These things are not mutually exclusive.”

“So I go to Columbia, and then what? Be an activist?”

“Maybe! You be whatever the world needs you to be.”

“And you think if I finish my bachelor’s, I’m going to be alien fucking Gandhi? People won’t listen to me. Why would they listen to me over anyone else?”

“Because you are who you are, and you’ve done what you’ve done! You are the first human in history to break the communication barrier, and people don’t even know that about you. You’re the girl in the photograph who threw her body between an unconscious alien and the barrel of a gun.”

“And people think I’m an insane species traitor for that.”