“I do,” I said, nodding. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I was going to do with that information. But for tonight, knowing it felt like enough. “So I think, you and I, we’re probably . . .”

“Yeah,” Topher said, pulling on his shirt and buttoning it up. “I figured that.” I pulled on my tank top, and then we just looked at each other for a moment, across the comforter with rocket ships printed on it. “I sometimes wonder,” he finally said, his voice soft and maybe the most genuine I’d ever heard it, all games and stratagems gone, “if maybe in the beginning, I’d just . . . if we’d actually . . .” He reached forward and brushed his fingers through the ends of my hair slowly, like he knew that soon he wouldn’t be able to do this. “Never mind,” he said, shaking his head, some of the briskness coming back into his voice. He looked away from me and adjusted his cuffs, and when he looked back, I could see the little authentic window he’d shown me was now closed.

Topher headed back down to the party after that, and I waited two minutes, more out of habit than anything else, before following him. I let myself out the front door and walked to my car, which I’d parked half a mile up the road. It was a breezy night, the humidity cut by the wind, and I took off my flip-flops and held them in one hand as I walked barefoot, tipping my head back to look up at the sky.

I remembered the stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars that had been all over the walls of the kid’s bedroom—the ones that looked pretty good until you had the real thing to compare them with, and then they just looked like pale imitations. I thought about the guy outside, and his galaxy theory, and as I looked up, I wondered which of these stars—the ones that seemed so permanent and fixed—weren’t actually done changing quite yet.

The Elder shook his head, feeling the weight of each of his years, the wisdom he had that nobody seemed to be able to hear. “You have to try,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, then opened them and forced himself to go on. “You have to take your chances. Go and attempt and see what happens. And even if you fail—especially if you fail—come back with your experience and your hard-won knowledge and a story you can tell. And then later you can say, without regret or hesitation . . . ‘Once, I dared to dare greatly.’?”

—C. B. McCallister, The Drawing of the Two. Hightower & Jax, New York.

Chapter NINETEEN

Two beeps from my phone sent me bolting upright in bed the next morning, fumbling for it and sending the stack of precarious things on my nightstand crashing to the floor. I squinted at my phone, trying to get my eyes to focus, willing it to be texts from my friends. Maybe Toby and Bri had figured out a way to move past this, and Palmer had decided not to be mad at me any longer, and . . . I felt my shoulders slump when I saw what was actually there, two calendar reminders that had popped up.

Dad—campaign event/New York. 12 PM

Clark’s reading!!!! New Jersey 3 PM

I looked at these, and at the exclamation points by Clark’s, realizing that with everything going on, I’d forgotten about both events and had certainly not put together that they were happening on the same day. As far as I knew, I was not expected to be at my father’s event—Peter hadn’t said anything and neither had my dad, so I figured I was in the clear.

I flopped back onto my bed, then looked at my calendar for the day—which was totally open. I must have cleared it with Maya for Clark’s reading. Now, the thought of having the whole day ahead of me open—especially with my revelation from the night before—was not appealing in the least. I pulled up my texts and started to write Maya, asking her if there were any walks I could take over today—I’d even deal with a cat—when my phone screen turned black. I’d run the battery down.

My first thought was that I’d have to tell Toby that I could no longer make fun of her for this, before I remembered, once again, what had happened. I pushed myself out of bed and went downstairs, yawning, in my sleep shorts and the ASK ME ABOUT THE LUMINOSITY shirt of Clark’s that I’d never gotten around to returning.

“Morning,” my dad said as I stepped into the kitchen. He was hovering around the coffeepot, but in a way that made me think he wasn’t actually having coffee and had instead been waiting for me to come down.

“Hi,” I said, rubbing my hand across my eyes as I went to the fridge in search of orange juice. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a suit jacket, but no tie—his I’m professional but not stuffy outfit he always wore when campaigning in the summers. His hair, though, was as sharply parted as ever. “So,” I said, after taking a long drink and waiting for my brain to start waking up, “You have that campaign event today?”

“Kind of,” my dad said, giving me a shrug. “It’s the governor’s campaign. He just wanted to me to say a few words.”

I nodded as I took another drink of my juice, convinced that even after all these years, I would never understand how politics worked. The governor and my dad had privately hated each other for years, but maybe he was trying to get a piece of my dad’s redemption arc. It was all going to start unfolding at a press conference on Monday, with Peter laying out every step of it.

“But there’s actually something I wanted to show you,” my dad said, smiling at me, and I realized he really had been waiting for me to get up.