It’s supposed to set me up with my ideal match, to give us time to interact and get to know each other before the semester starts. The thought has trailed after me like my own personal rain cloud all day, and since the clever wind didn’t follow me home, I’ve had to tug it behind me lest it rain on innocent patrons.

When I get home, I drop my camera on my bedspread, too tired to put it away, and allow myself a brief game of pretend. Even though the new normal has meant forgoing all imagination beyond reading, I take the little rain cloud with me when I go shower. I watch as it floats beneath the spigot, growing dark as it fills with water and then drains itself over my head.

Serves me right.

The bathroom steam curls behind me as, wrapped in a towel, I return to my bedroom, where I will edit a few photos before I go to sleep.

I’m thinking I really should fill out that survey, too, when my eyes focus on my mother. She’s sitting on my bed in her new grocery store polo, my camera in her hand.

“Mom?”

Her head jerks, blonde hair flying up in surprise as she quickly sets the camera aside.

“Sorry,” she says guiltily, like she was reading my diary.

She looks older, her shoulders frail and arms thin. Her nails look brittle and dull.

Adjusting my towel tighter, I sit next to her on the bed, reaching across her to grab my camera. It’s still on, the thumbnails from tonight’s event in their neat, orderly rows.

I should be mad at her for snooping, but I’m not.

She’s looking at me from the side of her eyes and the TV is blaring an electric toothbrush commercial from the living room, but something about sitting next to her—my crustacean mother, who never found another shell to live in after my father left us—makes me pity her.

It also makes me think of Nolan and flip phones and Orman.

Nolan.

A whale peeps out hopefully from the waves, the first I’ve seen since Lochbrook, but I shove it under the water and sail on in my carefully steered, carefully constructed vessel of efficiency and adulthood.

“I’ve been taking photos at the bookstore,” I tell her. “Author signings and stuff.”

I tilt the camera’s viewer to her, where a photo of an older white guy with his mouth open, an overly thick book in front of him, awaits. “This is John Rinker. He writes really boring books that everyone loves.”

I click through a few more thumbnails, pausing on one from an event last week. A woman grins hugely at the camera, holding her middle-grade book above her head like a Super Bowl trophy.