I waited for more hard parts, the ones books say begin when you’re young but always, always end in the early teenage years to allow for happily-ever-after. The Final Big Bad Thing would happen before high school graduation. Everything bad happens to you in high school or after you’ve turned forty and have a spouse and six kids and a few decades of hard-earned disappointment under your belt.

Books lie. Life isn’t finished with you when you are eighteen or when you think you’ve had enough.

It’s never enough. You’re never in the clear.

Jenna thought her books should be new and pure, untouched by anyone but herself. I prefer my books to have already been occupied, to have stories independent of the one carried on the page. I like to imagine my used books as little soldiers that have gone off to serve their duty elsewhere before coming into my hands. Books are something to be stepped inside of, to be occupied and lived in. Maybe that’s why I tend to loan out my books while Jenna rarely parted with hers.

But Jenna is gone now. She’s gone, and her parents have bequeathed me her library.

“She’d want you to have them,” Mr. Williams says through tears, when he and Mrs. Williams come to check on me a few days after we watch Jenna’s body get lowered into the ground.

This is only the second or third time they have been inside my mother’s house, and they look out of place seated on the edge of my twin bed.

Mr. Williams is vying for me to spend the remainder of the summer with them, but something inside me balks.

“You wouldn’t … you wouldn’t have to sleep in Jenna’s room,” Mr. Williams says. “But we could get you all the help you need. Counselors and therapists and college coaches, whatever you need … whatever you want.”

“I know,” I say, rubbing my temples to try to stop the low throbbing. “I know.”

“Mark,” Jenna’s mother says. Her tone is low, mildly chastising. “She doesn’t want to be in our house.”

She’s right. I can’t stand the thought of being smothered by the long hallways of their immaculate house, which hold almost as many pictures of me on the walls as of Jenna.

Pictures of us in mud masks and pajamas. Shots of us grinning in front of the ocean, with the tip of Mr. Williams’s pinky in the corner of the frame. The one of Jenna looking back over her shoulder and smiling her devastating smile, the one she rarely let people see, the one that made her face glow and her eyes crinkle.