The Facebook account was Lisa’s. Marcus didn’t have one as far as I knew. Her account was set to public, which I took to be a sign of a trusting nature, or ignorance. My own account was under the name Ay Cee. I didn’t have a profile picture or any friends. It was just an eye. Lots of people were like Lisa, and I liked to roam, looking at pictures of random Christmas office parties, following seams of outrage, throwing in names of old teachers and classmates and seeing what was thrown back.

I lay on the bed in the room at the Castle & Ball cradling my phone, tapping on the screen with a finger. The window was open and from outside I could hear the traffic passing down the square, voices rising from the pavement outside where the smokers gathered. I felt that if I listened hard enough, I would hear us; piling out of the van to get fags and Coke at the shop, bickering over whose turn it was to pay. Not mine. Probably Marcus’s. Maybe Em’s, treating us with her earnings from the tearooms.

As though I’d summoned her, Em appeared, in an album of photos called “School Days—Saint John’s 89–96.”

Em is twelve. She stands among the choir wearing a toga made from a sheet while Joseph, decked out in a Technicolor dreamcoat run up by the teachers in the home ec department, belts out the song about having a dream.

The stage lights shine on Em’s face. Her mouth is open in a perfect O, her hair parted in the middle, falling in two straight curtains.

Memory is not the analog photograph that fades. Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys—an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door is a thousand other doors.

On the bed, in the room over the pub, I made like Mrs. East, time traveling, reentering the past in reverie.

Joseph is Tony Salter from the sixth form, who we all followed about that year. This year, the musical is the school’s Christmas production.

Under cover of darkness, Em and I go out and cut down armfuls of mistletoe from the oaks in the paddock by her house. We smuggle it into school in carrier bags, waiting for our moment, stalking Tony Salter from football practice to his math class, to the ten minutes he spends wrapped up in the stage curtains with Amanda Walker at break.