That’s the photo Mrs. Williams had blown up and framed for the funeral service. During the reception at their house, Kailey Lancaster pointed to where the wrapped canvas picture sat on an easel and whispered to her boyfriend, “It doesn’t even look like her.”

It took everything in me not to “accidentally” knock her plate of cheese cubes and fruit out of her hand.

I shove the memory from my brain and half try to give Jenna’s books back, to insist they return the six or so massive boxes to Jenna’s shelves, but her parents refuse to hear of it.

When they finally leave, I spend what feels like hours going through Jenna’s library and systematically destroying page 49 of each of her books, tearing the pages in half before sloppily taping them back together. The first roll of tape I grab from the kitchen junk drawer is double-sided. I numbly use it for about twelve books. I don’t attempt to fix the others.

It was Jenna’s rule of reading excerpts, the page 49 thing.

“Far enough to get a feel for what the author’s writing is really like without going too far and risking a huge spoiler,” she always said.

I don’t know why I rip the pages. Maybe I’m hoping she will come back and chastise me for ruining her books. Maybe I’m trying to erase her, to make the books my own so I can forget perfect Jenna and her perfect books ever existed.

Or maybe I’m just stupid with grief and don’t know what I’m doing.

Later that night, summer rain patters against the window and drowns out even my most melancholy thoughts, and I try to read the book I started before graduation. Over and over, I try. I switch to Orman, and I try again. But my eyes refuse to change the letters into sentences, the sentences into pages.

I reread the same sentence no less than five times before I give up. I close the book and lie on my back with my eyes closed.

My life has split in two. Before there was a before and a subsequent after, I imagined myself a talented reader. Reading, for me, has always been more like playing a video game than watching a movie, an active experience that used to leave me physically and emotionally wrought.