Fangirl

voice were too much for Cath. Sometimes she felt like he was talking to them like her dad talked to her and Wren. Like they were both his girls.
    Cath tried to shake it off. She tried to meet him other places if Reagan was in the room.
    But when they were alone in the room without Reagan, they didn’t act much differently. Cath still sat at her desk. And Levi still sat on her bed with his feet on her chair, talking circles around her. Lazy, comforting circles.
    He liked to talk about her dad and Wren. He thought the twin thing was fascinating.
    He liked to talk about Simon Snow, too. He’d seen all the movies two or three times. Levi saw lots of movies—he liked anything with fantasy or adventure. Superheroes. Hobbits. Wizards. If only he were a better reader, Cath thought, he could have been a proper nerd.
    Well … maybe.
    To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one. Cath would move into the World of Mages in a heartbeat. She’d felt almost despondent last year when she realized that, even if she discovered a magical wormhole into Simon’s world, she was too old now to go to the Watford School of Magicks.
    Wren had been bummed, too, when Cath pointed it out. They were lying in bed on the morning of their eighteenth birthday.
    “Cath, wake up, let’s go buy some cigarettes.”
    “Can’t,” Cath said. “I’m going to watch an R-rated movie—in the theater. And then I’m gonna go get drafted.”
    “Oh! Let’s skip class and go see Five Hundred Days of Summer. ”
    “You know what this means, don’t you?” Cath looked up at the giant map of Watford they’d taped to the ceiling. Their dad had paid one of the designers at work to draw it for them one year for Christmas. “It means we’re too old for Watford.”
    Wren sat back against her headboard and looked up. “Oh. You’re right.”
    “It’s not that I ever thought it was real,” Cath said after a minute, “even when we were kids, but still—”
    “But still…” Wren sighed. “Now I’m too sad to start smoking.”
    Wren was an actual nerd. Despite her fancy hair and her handsome boyfriends. If Cath had found that wormhole, that rabbit hole, that doorway in the back of the closet, Wren would have gone through with her.
    Wren might still go through with her, even in their current state of estrangement. (That would be another good thing about finding a magic portal. She’d have an excuse to call Wren.)
    But Levi wasn’t a nerd; he liked real life too much. For Levi, Simon Snow was just a story. And he loved stories.
    Cath had fallen behind on Carry On, Simon since this thing with Levi started—which on the one hand, was perfectly okay; she wasn’t such a nerd that she’d rather make up love scenes with boys than be in one.
    On the other hand … Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance was coming out in less than three months, and Cath had to finish Carry On by then. She had to. The Eighth Dance was the very end of the Simon Snow saga—it was going to settle everything—and Cath had to settle it her way first. Before Gemma T. Leslie closed the curtains.
    Cath could study when Levi was in the room (he needed to study, too—he sat on her bed and listened to his lectures; sometimes he played solitaire at the same time), but she couldn’t write with him there. She couldn’t get lost in the World of Mages. She was too lost in Levi.
    Levi was five-foot-eleven. She’d thought he was taller.
    He was born on a ranch. Literally. His mom’s labor came on so fast that she sat down on the stairs and caught him herself. His dad cut the cord. (“I’m telling you,” Levi said, “it’s not that different from calving.”)
    He lived with five other guys. He drove a truck because he thought everybody should drive a truck—that driving around in a car was like living with your hands tied behind your back. “What if you need to haul something?”
    “I can’t think of a single time my family has needed a truck,” Cath said.
    “That’s because you’ve got car blinders on. You don’t even allow yourself to see outsized opportunities.”
    “Like what?”
    “Free firewood.”
    “We don’t have a fireplace.”
    “Antlers,” he said.
    Cath snorted.
    “Antique couches.”
    “Antique couches?”
    “Cather, someday, when I get you up to my room, I will entertain you on my beautiful antique couch.”
    When he talked about the ranch or his family or his truck, Levi’s voice slowed down, almost