Click. Click.

“These are good, Ames. Really good.”

She angles the viewer to show me a photo she’s settled on, lightly tracing a chipped nail along the image of a customer leaning against the wall, her head thrown back in laughter at something an author said.

I like this photo, too. Her eyes are closed, but painted above her head, on the wall behind her, are the ever-watching eyes of Dr. Eckleburg from The Great Gatsby. If I were to call it anything, it’d be Dreaming with Your Eyes Shut.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell Mom. “It’s not something I can turn into a career. I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”

Mom clicks through a few more thumbnails and says, “I think you just have to do it, kid. And keep doing it.” She hands the camera back to me. “The bookshop isn’t a bad place to start.”

This is all very, very abnormal.

“But I have plans,” I say. “The Williamses … they want me to go to college for something different, something safer.”

I want her to tell me I’m making the right choice. Or even the wrong choice. But because my mother is my mother and not anyone else, she has reached the end of her bandwidth.

“Suit yourself,” she says, rising from the bed.

I click back to the picture of Jenna and stare at it until my hair dries, tracing every pore and detail of her that I can.

I want to see her. I want to tell her about Orman, about Nolan and Wally and Val’s. I want to make her laugh with stories about Mr. Larson’s coffee and to share her tears over Avery and Emily.

But Jenna’s not here.

The wind blows through the crack in my window. It’s not a clever wind, just a Texas breeze. But it makes me think of wind chimes and cemeteries, and suddenly I know where I need to go.

A memory: Jenna and me in the back of her parents’ car. Her dad is driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other interlaced with Mrs. Williams’s on the middle console. Jenna is ignoring them completely, but my eyes keep wandering to the way their hands fit together so neatly.

“How much longer?” Jenna’s eyes are glued to the internet browser on her phone screen and her thumb is hovering over the Refresh icon.

I jerk my eyes to my phone, open to the clock app that shows the time down to the second.

“Two minutes. Will you chill out? It’s not going to sell out that fast.”

Jenna doesn’t glare at me, but she would if she wasn’t afraid to look away from her phone.

“I’m not taking chances,” she says.

“I’m Not Taking Chances: A Memoir by Jenna Williams,” I say in my best droll voice.

“Amelia, it’s not funny. This is my lucky lipstick we’re talking about.”

“What is it you’re worried about, Jenna love?” Mrs. Williams asks from the front seat.