Kimmie had come home from the gym in the late afternoon to find her mom still in bed, watching the last minutes of Sixteen Candles over and over. But this wasn’t a normal viewing; this was something else entirely. Kimmie watched her mom view it seven times in a row and then called Lolly at school. Her sister wasn’t answering her cell, so Kimmie called the school’s front office and asked them to find her sister in play rehearsal because there was a family emergency.

By the time Lolly got to the phone in the office, she was hysterically crying, assuming someone had died. Kimmie told her older sister to stop blubbering and just listen. Lolly yelled at her younger sister for scaring her and then gave Kimmie her first lesson on how to recognize an Ambien stupor. Lolly’s theory was that sometimes when their mom couldn’t sleep even after taking an Ambien, she’d take another one in the morning, but then forget. She would then have her usual Nespresso to avoid a caffeine headache and go back to bed. This would produce a weird, chemically induced fugue state where their mother looked like she was awake, but was actually asleep.

“Let me guess,” Lolly said. “She’s watching TV?”

“Yes!” Kimmie answered.

“What’s she watching?”

“Some old movie called Sixteen Candles?” Kimmie said. “But she’s just watching the last five minutes, and when it ends she lifts her arm up like Frankenstein’s ex-wife and rewinds it to the part where the redhead walks out of the church in an ugly dress. She did it like seven times in a row. It’s freaking me out.”

“Been there, done that, own the T-shirt. Look, I wigged out the first time I saw Mom like that, too. It’s totally Stranger Things meets Paranormal Activity in a four-hundred-dollar bathrobe!” Lolly whispered, because she could tell the nosy office secretary was trying to eavesdrop. “Don’t sweat it, she’ll stop eventually. But once, years ago, I sat with her when she was watching the Hathaway transformation montage from The Devil Wears Prada and she finally agreed to get me a navy Prada mini backpack. So there’s bennies, too.”

“What’s a ‘bennies’?” Kimmie asked. Nothing made her feel more like a little sister than not understanding her older sister’s coolgirl slang.

“Benefits, dumb ass. Okay, gotta go. And next time, be a normal person and text me instead of calling the school and scaring the shit out of me.”

Kimmie, now understanding the deal and feeling sorry for her mom, sat and watched the end of Sixteen Candles with her at least ten more times, later taking the DVD and watching the whole thing on her laptop. Because of that day, those last five minutes of the movie were burned into Kimmie’s brain forever.