But today I was off my game. Nothing seemed to stand out. I stuck my head back around to the desk. “Hey, Harriet? Did you get the new Star Wars book?”

“No,” she said. “I could only get ten new books this summer and it didn’t make the cut.”

I groaned. “Are you kidding? Ten?”

“You’re telling me,” said Harriet, rolling her eyes. “Every year it’s less and less. This town. I swear.”

“My dad mentioned something about it,” I said. “That we aren’t swimming in dough.”

“Treading water is more like it,” said Harriet. “We had to send Josiah back to Madison and everything.”

“Seriously?”

Harriet swooped her arm across the empty library. “It isn’t exactly bustling in here, Abby. They thought we didn’t need two librarians.”

I suddenly missed Josiah. I almost had an urge to go pick up Abraham Lincoln: A History of America’s Greatest Leader.

Instead, I found a fantasy book I’d read a million times and curled up in my favorite beanbag chair by the huge window. Thunderstorm outside, just me and Harriet inside, and a book about a princess, a quest, and spaceships—yeah. It felt right, that instant click you get when you’re doing exactly what you want to be doing. There were no money problems in this particular galaxy.

Whenever I read fantasy, I made sure not to let it influence Planet Pirates too much. It might seem stupid, fine, but I was still holding on to some kind of weird hope that one day we’d get discovered and Planet Pirates would be huge. We’d make it big, me and Blair, and we could tour the country. Our stories, of Captain Moonbeard and Princess Stardust, would be read by millions of people and they’d make movies out of them, like Star Wars, where people would wait in line at midnight. So I didn’t want to accidentally plagiarize, or even make things too similar. I was trying to be original.

I had shown Sophie some of our drawings once and she had gotten all excited, saying we needed to mail them off to a fancy publisher. I couldn’t help it—I had started daydreaming. Spending most of my life writing alongside Blair sounded like a pretty good plan. So, sure, sometimes I thought about what it would be like to slide our creation into an envelope and mail it to New York. To get a phone call saying we were going to be famous authors and Marvel wanted to make Planet Pirates into a movie.

It was dumb. I knew that. But you can’t help your head from dreaming. Wishes aren’t a faucet you can just turn off.

Anyway, we’d probably never work on Planet Pirates again. Blair couldn’t draw when her hands were so shaky.

I stayed in the library for a while—one hour, two hours, three hours—until Mom texted me that they were on their way back from visiting Blair and that she wanted me home when they got there. I checked out the book and a few others, waving goodbye to Harriet as I left.