Once Elizabeth snaps the photo, he starts yammering again: “Oh, and another thing about the Loyola English department!” I made the mistake of telling him I’d be a freshman at his alma mater this year. “If Antonia Humphrey is still moldering in her corner office, don’t ever take her class on The Epic. That miserable twat. I spent three days on an essay comparing Odysseus and Travis Bickle and she called it forced and indulgent and gave me a C minus. Meanwhile the rest of the class is stuck in preschool, decoding symbolism like good little sheep‌—‌”

“Lenny,” says Elizabeth.

“What?”

“Maybe he’d like to ask you some questions about the show.”

“Well, he can’t. I can’t say anything.”

“Not spoilers. Just tidbits he might be interested in.”

“Oh. Fine, fine.” He sighs. “All right, Brendan. Can I interest you in any tidbits?”

“Sure.” I fiddle with my chicken kabob. “Actually, I did have a question.”

“I shall do my best.”

“It’s about Cadmus and Sim.”

“Oh goody.”

“So, I‌…‌” I gulp some water. “There’s a lot of ah, fanfiction about that one scene in the crystal spider cave‌—‌”

“Terrible episode. I regret it. Derailed the whole season’s momentum.”

“I sort of agree, but‌…‌” I’m blushing already; there’s no chance he’ll take this well. “After they say that line about how the cave could swallow up your secrets and it kind of faded out? Did they, um‌…‌do anything?”

“What do you mean?”

He blinks at me. I want to vanish.

“Anything romantic,” Elizabeth smiles.

“Did they fuck?” says Lenny Bray. “Is that the question?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Jesus. How would I know?”

My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

“Seriously, why even ask me that?”

“Well‌…‌ah, it’s your show, and‌—‌”

“I will never, ever, for as long as I live, understand you people. Every goddamned Q&A it happens! Mr. Bray, what does this line mean? Mr. Bray, is Castaway Planet the afterlife? Can Sim fall in love? Is Xaarg good or evil?” He stuffs two ravioli in his mouth. “Apparently an alarming percentage of you traipse through life without a single independent thought. I thought my fans were supposed to be smart!”

“But you created the characters, so‌—‌

“Oh, so I’m God? Is that it?”

“No, but‌—‌”

“Listen, you runt. I saw that self-righteous eyeroll when you said fanfiction. Let me tell you something: I fucking love fanfiction. Why do you think I made up these characters? So I could play with dolls in public and tell everyone else ‘hands off’? So I could spoon-feed you stories from on high about the mysteries of love and free will and giant alien spiders?” He shows me his palms, then the backs of his hands. “I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending. Castaway Planet is supposed to be a living piece of art!” He wags a tiny fork in my direction. “I don’t know you from Adam, but if you’re sitting there drooling in front of the TV like I suspect you are, letting me have the Final Word every goddamned Thursday night, you frankly don’t even deserve to be a fan, Brendan.”

Elizabeth sighs. She’s heard it before. “Lenny.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Come on.”

He purses his lips. “What?”

“This poor kid looks up to you. Can’t you give him an answer?”

Lenny Bray looks me right in the eye. He stabs another shark fritter with the little fork.

“I thought I just did,” he says.

I should be crushed by all this, but I’m not. I get this calm settled feeling, like when you see where the last three pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle are supposed to go.

“I have to leave now,” I tell them.

“I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth touches my hand. “He’s having a bad day.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to be me.” Leonard Bray pouts and shoves a fritter in his mouth. “No one has any idea.”

“That’s true, sir. It was good to meet you.”

“I doubt that.”

Elizabeth blots her pink lips with a napkin and folds it carefully on her empty plate. She’s given up saving the day; you can tell.

“At least let our driver take you back,” she says to the napkin.

Outside, cabs are rattling by; the day’s first firecrackers are going off in the distance.

“That’s okay.” I nod to Bray, standing Sim-straight. “I’ll find my own way.”

***

In two months, this’ll be my city.

I’ve been here in Baltimore a few times since I was a kid‌—‌an aquarium trip, a college tour‌—‌but never without my parents. I let myself meander. Past the tourist crowds and the glassed-in malls and the old battleships moored in the harbor, across a swarming intersection and into a homey network of narrow streets. Junk shops and bars and bookstores introduce themselves to me, murmur about new starts in new places where no one knows my name. Next year I could streak my hair with Manic Panic and go dancing at this club with the fiery wings painted on the door. I could join some Young Agnostics support group downtown or find one of those alternative churches with a rainbow-cross logo. I could watch Castaway Planet in a dorm bed with my boyfriend or read Thomas Merton in a tulip patch; I could sing for people in a nursing home or strum Jeff Buckley and Dylan covers on open mike nights in this café wallpapered with board games and doll heads.

Or I could do it all.

On the walk back to the Dorchester, I pass a wide patch of grass with three big abstract sculptures. Light gray concrete, shaped like smiles without a face. There’s a kid on one of them, dressed for the Fourth in navy shorts and a red-and-white striped shirt, trying to see how far he can walk up the side of the smile before gravity kicks him back down. On the second one, a neo-hippie girl with blond dreads and a sunflower dress is working out some tender instrumental on a blue guitar plastered with stickers from different cities. The third smile is up for grabs.

I sit down on it gingerly, like I have no right to. The action feels familiar, and then I realize that that’s how I sit down in church. Used to, at least. I swing my legs inside the smile and prop my feet up on the concrete, smoothing Abel’s white shirt across my chest. The sky is thick with puffy motivational-poster clouds; I take deep breaths and watch them morph across the blue for a whole minute. Two minutes. Three. I’ve never looked up for this long. Ever since I was old enough to know what a sin was, I’ve just naturally averted my eyes from the sky. As a kid it was terrifying: a place where divine judging eyes screened everything you did, where lightning bolts were hurled in anger from a golden throne, where your dead relatives clutched their harps and scanned your dirty thoughts like a waiting-room magazine.

I wonder if other people think weird thoughts like that. It seems unavoidable. You’re a kid, and how can they explain something huge and unknowable like God to a kid, so they draw a simple picture: he’s like a father in the sky, watching over us. Then you see statues and paintings of God in books and museums, so old they seem like historical records and not flights of fancy from ancient dead guys. And you file those away and fill in the rest of the portrait with your own references, until your picture of God is something like mine was: Ben Kingsley in a long Michelangelo beard, enthroned in an icy castle like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and scribbling (with the angry point of his thunderbolt) a fancier version of Santa’s Naughty or Nice list. You get older, but the kid’s picture stays with you. And then all of a sudden you’re eighteen and you’ve learned how to question and doubt and you think you’re smart enough to draw your own grown-up picture of what God might be, but part of you is still cringing with one eye to the sky, waiting for the thunderbolt.