Click.

As the “upload complete” icon flashed, she sat back and laughed. Her laptop, that dusty old machine, had just become her photographer. All it took was a clean shirt, a bed sheet, and a mirror taped to the bezel.

She stared at her clunky, five-year-old laptop. Its webcam was a tiny pinhole above the screen, a feature she had never used. “How hard can it be?” she muttered.

Her real wall had a faded band poster. She pinned a plain white bedsheet over it, smoothing the wrinkles with trembling hands. The camera app had a timer function—buried in a settings icon that looked like three tiny dots. She set it for five seconds.

She clicked the Start menu, typed “Camera,” and a small app window popped up. For a moment, she saw her own panicked face—tired eyes, frizzy hair, a coffee stain on her white shirt. Not exactly passport-worthy.