“Thank you, Danny.” Imogen cleared her throat. “I take umbrage at the fact, Little Miss Perfect, that you have a binary and totally bonkers definition of failure. And we all know binary definitions of anything are harmful and unhelpful.”

“Have you been calling her that in your head the whole time we’ve worked together—Little Miss Perfect, I mean?” asked Daniella. “Because I usually think of her as Little Miss Sunshine.”

“You’re both very rude,” said Rinn, at a loss for how the conversation was twisting and turning around her.

Daniella ignored this aside. “Wait, what was mine again?”

Imogen shrugged. “Cool Girl or Coolest Girl in the World.”

Daniella tilted her head. “Hers is better.”

“Guys!” said Rinn, feeling like she needed to take charge and focus the conversation.

Imogen’s expression grew stern. “We didn’t fail.”

“We did. The bookstore is closing. We’ll never see each other again. We’ll never all work together again.” And then, because Rinn really was feeling desperate, she tacked on, “Everything is horrible and nothing is good and nothing good will ever happen again. Bookstores are dying, and I can’t change that. And I really thought we could be friends.”

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” said Daniella.

Rinn reeled back. “Excuse me.”

“You heard me. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. We might not have saved Wild Nights the brick-and-mortar store, but we saved Wild Nights,” said Daniella.

“Yeah,” said Imogen. “And we saved Jo from taking out a terrible loan. Nobody is going to jail. Danny here announced she’s a poet. And, like, you rallied all those people, Rinn. You got so many people off their butts and got them into the store for poetry.”

Daniella nodded. “None of this should have worked. But it did. Maybe not all the way. Maybe not the way you saw it. But it worked because you believed it would.”

Rinn didn’t know what to say to that.

“We did that, Rinn. We all did it, and you got us there.” Imogen looked over at Daniella. “Well, Danny helped.”

Daniella slugged Imogen’s arm, but in a playful kind of way.

Imogen paused for a moment. “There’s this idea, I guess, in Islam—ummah, and if you translate it directly, it means ‘community,’ which is cheesy as hell. But really it’s this idea that we share something together beyond any one tribe. Like back in the day everyone on the Arabian Peninsula was fighting and retaliating and fighting. But Islam was something they had in common. Something beyond their close-knit kinship ties. A thing bigger than any of them. And we did that today. I’m depressed, and Daniella is angry, and you’re full of sunshine. Eli’s basically a criminal, and AJ is an earnest art kid. And we all found this bookstore to be bigger than any one of those things. You helped us find that.”