“Selfie,” I said, and turned the screen to face us.

“I look gross,” she said.

“I can Facetune.” I wedged myself close. She smiled without teeth. I made a fish face. Next shot she tried on my expression and I kissed her cheek, then flipped the phone and got lost favoriting what I’d edit later.

“I’m tired,” she finally said. “Should I sleep in your room?”

“My mom’s bed is the big one,” I said, still scrolling. “We can both stretch out.”

She got up, took her half-eaten pudding back to the kitchen. The fridge opened and shut.

“I’d rather sleep alone,” she said.

I put the phone down, watched her walk into my room. I went to the door, considered how to protest, but she was already sitting on the mattress, setting an alarm.

“Sweet dreams,” she said without looking up.

“You too,” I mumbled and returned to the couch, my phone, scrolling, waiting, as if she might talk to me from the other side of the wall between us. When we were girls she went through a phase where she muttered in her sleep, hidden messages I listened for and reported in the morning. “What does it mean?” I asked. Only sometimes did she know.

I DIDN’T THINK I’d sleep but woke and knew I had. Outside, in the live oaks, the grackles croaked. I opened Instagram, searched Jake and found nothing new. I got up, checked my bed, tossed and empty. I checked the kitchen, the bath, my mother’s room. Leah’s bags were by the front door. But she herself was gone. “Where you at?” I texted then made a pot of coffee. I dumped extra Splenda in my cup and took it to the porch to sit and wait and edit the H-E-B images. I opened my photos folder, scrolled past the pictures I’d shot of Leah, to my own unfiltered reflection. Cast in the harsh grocery store light, I looked exhausted and overcooked, like I’d spent the day tanning, stocking up sweat and skin damage. I flipped to the next shot, the big reveal. My tits looked too high to be real, too firm to be a pleasant simulation of realness. I swiped back to Leah, bare faced and bony, her eyelashes colorless wisps. “Wow,” she had said. “I look kind of great.” Maybe she was right; maybe she did. Maybe I was the sick one, unable to tolerate the prospect of her beauty, that she might share it and be loved. I put down the phone, stared hard through the wet scrim of spring air until I saw her on the other side—a speck, a shadow, a girl—and the scrim lifted.

“I just had to run,” she said, and climbed the steps.

“There’s coffee,” I said. “What do you eat for breakfast?” She pulled her phone from a zippered pocket in her leggings, checked the time.

“We should go,” she said.