“You can repay me.” The woman smiled at them for checking each other’s worried glances for the right answer to that. “And by that, I mean you can show me your drawings.” She nodded toward Carly’s spiral-bound sketchbook. “I used to be an art expert. I can smell an artist a mile away. Either that or I saw you showing your friend here while you two were in line. Take your pick.”

Carly laughed and passed over the book. Shy and proud all at the same time, her face burned again, for what felt like the hundredth time since she and Ada had come in the door.

“I’m Emma, by the way. You’re Carly, or so my new best friend, Dylan, tells me.”

The girls giggled.

“And you . . . ?” Emma left it open for the answer.

“I’m Ada.”

“Do you also draw, Ada?”

“Nah. That’s her thing. I’m a musician. And a nerd. DC, not Marvel. Puh-lease.”

Emma flipped through Carly’s drawings, pausing, turning some of them into the light. She wasn’t kidding about the art thing. Carly had seen lots of people look at her drawings.

When she drew, it was a different kind of thinking. A pointed blankness in the front of her mind and whirring concentration in the back of it. But the moment when other people looked at what she’d done, when her ideas went into their heads in the first pass of their eyes, that was amazing. She felt both impossibly close and spacewalk-distanced from anyone who was looking at her work.

Everybody liked them. They liked them because they were good. Carly knew this, though smiles and shrugs were all anyone ever got out of her in reaction. It was the weirdest kind of thanks to give when someone had liked the work that was private and public all at the same time.

But this woman, Emma, could really see what the drawings were made of. Carly watched what she paid attention to on the page. Emma knew exactly how Carly’s pencil moved, where she’d started with the shadows and edging. Emma knew everything about what she was looking at.

“These are very good.”

Carly smiled and her shoulder moved toward her ear as if it couldn’t help it.

“No, really. These are excellent. Truly.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So, I see Disney here. Some anime. Some original stuff, too.” Emma wound the pages back to the beginning. “But what else? Who do you like? Old Masters? Renaissance? Or more recent stuff?”

Carly didn’t know the answers to those questions. She had only the vaguest idea of categories and famous names.

Emma watched her with a steady patience, waiting for an answer.

“I . . . I don’t really know what I like.”

“Well, what do your parents like?”