She doesn’t move, but chuckles. “I like to think of it more like a statement of self-expression. It’s like an art installation.”

“Uh-huh. And what’s that cup of juice on the dresser, a science experiment?”

You could chart my life from the things in this house like rings on a tree. Lottie lives on a nice street, just one over from mine but prettier, happier. Huge trees, houses from the eighties. She has a great tree house that her dad built when we were kids, I think to make up for the fact that neither of us has siblings.

Lottie is not some hipster who just got a record player. It was in this room before she was, like a dinosaur bone found in a cave. The room still has some of the relics of their life before they had Lottie: an embroidered wall hanging of a bright-yellow bird, a small painting of a little creek and some shadowy trees, and a big poster for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Over the years, Lottie and I have combed through all of her parents’ old records, laughing at the covers and playing songs from unheard bands. Now she buys new vinyl, too, and she spent her birthday money on decent headphones—not wireless, but still good. I’ll come over sometimes and she’ll be sitting in the room hidden behind a pile of crap, and I have to follow the cord to locate her.

I flip through a book from a stack on her night table. She looks over.

“You can borrow that if you want. It’s really good.”

“Okay, maybe,” I say, knowing I won’t, tossing it back on the pile. Lottie’s into books the way I’m into movies—these have always been our “things.” “Stevie and her movies,” my mom proudly tells anyone who will listen, “and her best friend is a reader. Go figure.”

Sometimes Lottie will start reading a book while I’m there, and I’ll just go hang out with her mom. Half the dinners we have together I have helped prepare. I know where they keep their peeler and their measuring cups. My dreams take place in this house. I know its nooks and crannies, the scary basement that still has drawings on the unfinished drywall that Lottie and I did as kids, and the cupboard where all the board games are kept. I know the smell of her room like it’s part of me, and until she got taller than me, I used to see her closet as an extension of my own.

“Are you going to Paige’s Saturday night?” she asks me now, turning around.