“Killjoy.” I thwap her on the shoulder with the tube.

“Child.” She grabs the poster from me and hits me lightly atop my head, before heading to the register and sliding her father’s credit card across the counter.

“You didn’t have to buy it,” I say afterward.

She shrugs. “Dad said, and I quote, ‘It’s your graduation present. Go crazy. But don’t tell your mother.’”

“Your poor mom,” I say. “She’s going to want to throttle you when the credit card bill comes in. Meanwhile, you’ll be far away in Ireland, collecting plants and being nerdy.”

“Specimens,” Jenna corrects.

“Whatever.” I sidestep a woman in a long skirt pushing a dolly full of boxes like it’s a race car. “She’ll want to give you one of your own lectures and you won’t be there to hear it.”

“I’ll just blame it on you and she can give you an earful.”

We move into a slim, unoccupied space between booths so Jenna can pull up the festival schedule on her phone.

It suddenly strikes me as very adult, our solitary trip to California. Jenna and I are in charge of the events we attend, where we eat lunch, what swag we buy. I keep waiting for somebody to accuse us of being unaccompanied minors, to escort us from the premises and call our parents, but we’re eighteen. We’re enrolled in Missoula for the fall. We are adults. Sort of.

I am vitalized and cowed by this realization, and I want to remember this moment of watching my friend lead the way on our first long-distance solo trip. While Jenna scrolls, I wrestle my trusty digital camera from my backpack and remove the lens cover. I look through the viewfinder and snap one picture—it’s my rule—and then let the camera hang from its strap around my neck.

“If we book it, we could make it to ballroom C for the ‘It’s Only a Flesh Wound: Violence in Fantasy’ panel,” I say, grinning. “Get it? Book it?”

My laugh echoes in the small space, but Jenna only snorts and keeps scrolling. I practically have the schedule memorized, after a week of alternating between staring at the welcome email and obsessively rereading the two Orman books.

My mind wanders ahead to what his session will be like, my head spinning with everything I know about Orman and Endsley.