I glance around at the scattered books because I highly doubt it’s organized at all, but I don’t interrupt. It’s a miracle this lady is even considering me at this point.

“Anywho,” she says, “what do you think? You like books?”

I nod. “Yeah, Fitzgerald’s great.”

She laughs, clapping me on the shoulder. “You read classics? You struck me as more of a manga kid.”

I blink. “Wait, that counts?”

“Yes, of course it does.” She chuckles, steering me farther into the store. “We’ve got a whole section for it. Those kids come in here, and they are hungry. What kind of stuff do you like?”

“All of it,” I say, my mind gravitating toward the massive stack of manga I packed up before the move. It’s all in California by now, probably collecting dust in some Public Storage. Growing up with Japanese grandparents, I’d always been into anime and manga and those corny action shows with the specialized martial arts, but I mostly shoved them away in grade school when everyone started calling me a weeb or asking me to be their waifu or whatever. It was like, how can I even enjoy this part of my culture when people have turned it into a fad and a joke? But I never really gave up manga. It’s just the one place I can still find storytelling that acknowledges that part of my heritage.

Of course, every teacher and librarian I’ve ever met made it very clear that anything with pictures didn’t count as a “real” book once you passed the age of, like . . . six. So books with pictures, inverted text direction, and Eastern storytelling conventions? Definitely not. And frankly, while manga’s always been a huge inspiration for me storytelling-wise, I can’t remember the last time I really talked about it.

“I started this new series about a girl who’s running from this curse—”

“There’s this real popular one. Kids come in here wanting to talk about it for hours, and, well, I just don’t understand,” she says, waving her hands through the air. “Some academy thing. Boca something?”

“Boku No Hero Academia?”

“Yes, that’s the one! You read it?”

I shrug because, yes, I read it, but she doesn’t need to know the extent to which I read it.

“Lovely! I have a couple questions for you, just to see how well you’ll do here.”

“Sweet, I’m ready!” I say.

“Let’s say a customer comes in with a return, but they don’t have their receipt,” Amy says. “What might you do in a situation like that?”

“Return the book?”

“No, no,” she says, shaking her head. “If they don’t have a receipt, we don’t know that they bought the book from our store. So what might you consider doing in a situation like that? Feel free to take some time to think it over.”