Ty and Nate are making fun of me from the front seat, and Cass and Rowe are yelling at them for me from the back. I’m in the middle, where I ignore their noise, flipping through my rag-tag fairytale—the notebook fringe flaking away on the edges. I run my finger over the stick-figure girl with long blonde hair and the prince standing next to her, holding a sandwich, and I smile when I read his butchered Spanish confession of love near the end, an arrow in the margin pointing to the words, reading “this means I love you.”

Yes, Houston.

Yes, it does.

THE END