I give up, and then through the window I see a group of college-age kids walking toward the town. I decide to finally see if I can take a look at Avalon School of the Arts. I should have been curious, but the fact that Aimee is here kind of wiped away any other curiosities.

I know exactly where to go, if my memory serves (not a given). I leash Maureen again and after a breezy little walk, I see it for the first time in real life.

Wow.

There it is.

There’s a low stone wall that breaks for the gated entrance, which is open. A gold plaque says AVALON SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, then beneath that, FOUNDED 1792.

I watch the students coming and going, and think, feeling unusually elderly at thirty, that they look so incredibly young. Like seriously. I see bad concealer amateurishly applied to cover up pimples and gawky bodies that haven’t yet filled out. In LA, every teenager seems to have the anxiety, cut-crease eye shadow, and skin care routine of a much older person, but here, they look like real kids.

They look how Aimee and I must have looked on our trip to St. Augustine. Awkward. Cute. How we must have been when we were here, in this life.

I enter the courtyard at the front of the school. There’s a fountain running in the center, and benches around squares of grass, a peaceful but enthusiastic energy around the place. I hear snippets of students running lines, complaining about professors, and passionately describing the costumes of a production of Les Misérables they saw in the West End on holiday.

Some people notice Maureen and point, saying, Oh, puppy! and other things people say when a cute dog suddenly appears.

I expect to feel envy or relief that I had never been one of these kids, and in a way I feel both, and in another way I feel neither.

Growing up, I never spent time surrounded by people who all wanted the same things I did. Not until LA, where none of us could really support each other since we were all squeaking by. In my college, everyone was majoring in different things and in my classes, there was only vague passion. Students who had chosen theatre because they liked it, not because they were dedicated to it.

What would it have been like to be in a college atmosphere like this, where everyone was here for their art, had to be really great to get accepted? And yet where it seems safer? In Florida it had been high-key as fuck, an endless loop of red Solo cups being filled with Fireball, chugging warm Natty Light in games of beer pong, and general education requirements that made it all feel like High School: The Sequel.