Rinn checked her phone. She didn’t know how to talk about the fact that she often wondered if the reason she succeeded as a Latinx girl with a book account on the internet was because she was half-white and because she was ethnically ambiguous-looking. That she must have benefited from some strange proximity to whiteness and that she was benefiting still by the way her account had grown. That she didn’t know if she deserved all the followers that she had amassed.

She didn’t have satisfactory answers to any of these questions. But she wore her hair curly so that her inheritance from her father—his black coiled texture—would not be erased. It would be seen every day by all the people who followed her. And she highlighted creators of color as best as she could. She did regular spotlights on Own Voices novels. She tried to talk about the stories that maybe other people had missed.

It didn’t feel like enough, though.

“I do have to look a certain way. I mean, it’s the internet, so it’s not like how I look has to be perfect. But it matters. It’s like I have to follow the rules I set up before I realized I was setting up rules. I’m not sure if that makes sense.”

AJ’s face scrunched up thoughtfully. It was a delightful expression. “No, it doesn’t. But I believe you. I do gotta ask—why do you work here? I mean, your account is massive.”

“Massive for books is still not massive given what people can get paid for social media,” said Rinn on a laugh. It was true that, given her following, she probably didn’t need to work a regular summer job anymore. But Rinn had two baby sisters. She was saving her internet money for all of their educations. She was putting it into special educational accounts for each of them. None of them were going to go into debt to go to school. Not if Rinn could help it. She was putting this book money to good use—debt-free college for her and for Gloria and Renate.

But that meant Rinn had to have another source of regular spending money. And even though she had initially chafed against the no-tech restrictions of Wild Nights, Rinn had come to appreciate the time away from her online persona. She’d take the bus to the blue line on the L and then walked the rest of the way to work. She felt independent. Like she could just be a regular girl working a regular job rather than this thing that had spiraled out of her hands and belonged more to her followers than her anymore.