“How?” I ask. Stupidly, brokenly.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“But she was in Ireland.”

Was. I’ve only known for a minute and Jenna is already a was instead of an is.

Jenna’s mother barely stops to breathe; she uses her attorney voice, her no-nonsense voice, the kind she uses for client calls or when Mr. Williams doesn’t cut the Thanksgiving turkey into thin enough slices.

“Will you speak, Amelia? At her funeral, I mean?”

I say yes, but when the day comes and I’m standing in front of a congregation that moments before had been singing a hymn of celebration for Jenna and her “reunion with her creator,” I lose it. I let myself bleed onto every surface—the podium, the hideous floral arrangements, her casket—as the stories and memories imprison my head and my voice.

If this were a photo I was trying to frame in my lens, I would stretch the shadows creeping from beneath her stupid casket as far as I could. I would stretch them until they smothered the somber faces in the pews and all that would be left unshadowed in the photo would be myself behind the podium and what’s left of Jenna. I would call it Survivor and a Half.

But my imagination can only keep me occupied for so long. Countless pairs of eyes look at me with pity and heartbreak, and I feel the years of waiting in line for book signings, the late-night study sessions when one of us had procrastinated too long on research papers, the countless hours spent reading together. All that, and the stupid, stupid pictures tacked to her bedroom wall, work their way down from the lump in my throat to the choke hold squeezing my heart.

Eventually the pastor comes up to pat my back and lead me away from the microphone, my hiccupping sobs loud enough without the assistance of amplification.

It’s wrong, I keep thinking. Life isn’t following its script and it’s not fair … I’m not prepared.

While some kids waited for their letter to be delivered by owl or for their closet to one day reveal a magical land with talking animals and stone tables, I’d waited for the other shoe to drop. Because if there’s one thing I learned from books, it’s that life is fair and unfair, just and unjust. When my father left us, I thought that was the end of it, but then Jenna found me and life was dreadfully out of balance again, too right and happy.