Jenna sighs. “ColorCentral is known for selling out of lipstick. It’s a miracle they’re restocking a color to begin with, and it’s the only berry colored matte I’ve found that doesn’t make me look like I’m wearing clown makeup.”

“And it’s apparently lucky,” I add. “One minute, Jenna.”

“What makes it lucky?” her dad asks.

A pause.

“I was wearing it when I first properly met Amelia,” Jenna says matter-of-factly. “I saw her in the window because I was looking at my reflection to check my new lipstick.”

I have never heard this story.

“Amelia, time.”

“Jenna?”

She narrows her eyes but doesn’t look up. “Time, Amelia. I need the time.”

“Jenna.”

She looks up. “What?”

“You’re ridiculous,” I say. And because I suddenly feel the need to tell her, I add, “I love you, but you’re ridiculous.”

“I’m not ridiculous,” she says, looking back down at her phone. “It was the first time I had worn it and, A, I looked fabulous and, B, it made us friends. So excuse me for trying to do everything in my power to ensure our friendship lasts forever.”

“Four seconds,” I say.

She buys ten tubes of the same lipstick. When she announces this triumphantly to the car, her dad says, “You don’t need makeup to look beautiful, sugar, but if it makes you happy, I’m happy.” Her mom calls it a waste of money but is appeased when Jenna offers to give her one of the tubes.

“Ridiculous,” I repeat, but I smile when I say it, because she thinks meeting me is worth deeming lipstick lucky.

Her answering smile is dazzling, the gleaming one that makes me believe she really could be a celestial being trapped in human skin.

“May our friendship last longer than ColorCentral’s restocks,” she says.

“Duh,” I say.

I haven’t been to her grave since the funeral. When the headstone came in, Mark offered to take me to see it, but I didn’t want to.

I still don’t want to, not really, but I have nowhere else to go where I can reach her. I know she’s not really there, but it seems like the place to go for the confession I have weighing on my chest.

It’s too dark to see without my phone’s flashlight, and it takes wandering up and down aisle after aisle of the dead before I find Jenna’s grave.

There is a bouquet of fake yellow flowers stuffed into the permanent metal vase attached to the stone. They’re garish, even at night, and I absently rearrange them with one hand, the other pointed downward at the stone I don’t want to read.

Reading it is the final step. It means she’s not coming back, that I’m the one responsible for making decisions and for living with them.

I turn my phone light off and sit on the thin sidewalk in the dark.

Cricket and locust songs fill the air around me, an uproar of insect melodies that hides my voice when I say, “Hello, Jenna.”