"Definitely not reaching for denial there either," she says back, needling him because she can. People tend to think she's younger than she is, which apparently was some kind of great thing in the world before. Mostly it just annoys her. The idea that you hit Adult(tm) at an arbitrary age seems really stupid in a world where you can die at any age from the same things. That was obviously true before, too, but the landscape changed with the Infection.

She puts the journal down and shrugs. "Yeah, well, that was when I'd just met you."

She's quiet for a moment when he asks that question, fingers lingering over the journal. In the earlier pages, there are still pictures of Joel's face, words she wrote to and for a dead man.

She nods. "Yeah," she says. She figures there's more than one person she knows that was like that. Tommy was probably different before, too. But Joel...no one was quite like Joel with all the good and the bad. Maybe some of who he was in Jackson was similar to who he'd been before the world ended for him. But not quite. You can't come back from something like that. She hadn't understood that at fourteen. She'd barely understood it at all. But now she can't seem to come back from the aftermath either, can she? It's not just Joel, though that's the thing she's taken the hardest, that changed her so immediately. It's Riley and Sam and Henry and Marlene and the corpses in the hospital in Utah and her lack of agency.