A Sincere Action

Yesterday I received a note from my student Samantha. She is a student who has skipped the majority of one of the two classes I teach and is passing the other class by her shoe strings. Because it was "my last day" she came to both of the classes. At the end of the second one, she handed me a haphazardly folded piece of notebook paper addressed like an envelop with "Smile Sunshine" written in sloppy handwriting. Inside it held a neon-orange 1/4 sheet of cardstock paper with a note written from the top-left corn to the bottom-right. It stated the following message:

Carmen -
Its been real.
Even though you played
games. :( ha. if you decide
to join look me up... if not email
me. Im not a student after
Tuesday.

She signed using her email address. My initial read of this came to the following conclusion. Samantha had told me earlier that she found someone that told her my real name. She has been asking me frequently through my 8-weeks at UHS what my first name was so that she could find me on Facebook, and I've been eluding the questions using humor. Hence why she thinks I've been playing games. I believe that if I had told her my name (in order to not make a big deal about it) Samantha would have challenged my roll by addressing me as an equal. Instead, I got pulled in by the approach I had selected. I was thinking the reasoning for this note was to generate a mentor or a friend. The first seemed unlikely, as her level of interest in art was minimal, while the second was just as unlikely (if not more so) as I had no intension in being friends with an 18 year-old.
It dawned on me today to look at the other side of the neon-orange cardstock paper. What originally had registered in my mind was that it was only a piece of scrape paper found in the computer lab. Now I looked at the invitation on the, noticing for the first time that it is an invitation to Samantha's graduation party.
Yesterday I had a discussion with my corporating teaching, during which she explained "receiving a personal invitation from a student is a sincere gesture." This is the conversation that came to mind when I realized that Samantha was inviting me to her graduation party. I am left wondering if the invitation is indeed as sincere of a gesture as the Utopia-like generalization of student actions stated by my corporating teacher – as Samantha may be just hoping for graduation gifts or an impossible friendship – and I am left to wonder if I should follow-up on this invitation.