“Count, Anna,” my mom instructed. I felt her fingers on my forehead, brushing away the hair, then wrapped around the clench of my hand. One, two, three, she sang, a technique learned from her latest self-help quest: a book, a course, an anonymous meeting of addictive personalities. Leah recited the numbers too. I followed with my breath. The panic became sub-perceptual. Afterward, I felt older and hungry. My mom bought beignets and rifled around in her giant purse for wet wipes when the powdered sugar stuck to our lips. We got in the car and drove, looking for a plot of quiet beach. On the edge of town, we found it, a spot we returned to every summer, Leah and I swimming, snacking, bearing our backs for my mother’s excessive sunscreen application. We were twelve when Instagram started, fourteen when we got phones and I made @annawrey. The first image I shared was the last one my mother took of Leah and me, the last summer at our spot, both of us bikini-clad and Paris-filtered, posed before the ocean’s gray scroll. At the time, the post earned ten likes. But in LA, with Jake, everything was growing, and every day love for that first picture ticked upward, too. A hundred, three hundred, six hundred, a thousand.

AT THE MANDALAY Bay, we climbed from the Rover, into the teem. The valet took Jake’s keys, accepted his tip. The travelers and gamblers and babies and janitors and sightseeing guides and toy poodles pushed in. I unlocked my phone.

My mother had called during the drive, and texted: “Who is that girl you are with on your account?” She wrote: “Where were those photographs taken and by whom?” I felt dread wash up inside me. I had meant to block @Naurene48 from seeing my recent stories, the shots of Ella and me by the pool, très Wild Things.

“I’m fine!” I texted back. “Don’t be dramatic, luv u, call u soon.”

I pressed send and trotted to keep up with Jake, striding forward through the throngs, the casino where tourists milled or sat at the slot machines, pulling levers, pressing buttons. Hundreds of eyes turned to see us. The carpet slowed the wheels of my suitcase and my shoulders caught the drag, rolled in, protective as the folded wings of a sleeping bat.