“No, no, I don’t think so,” says teenage-me, still in the accent. “I’m the same as when I left America! Only now, me favorite food is potatoes!”

This is too much for us both, and we burst into laughter all over again. We’re both laughing so hard that we’ve stopped making any sound. Our mannerisms are so similar to each other; we spent so much time together. Both our tongues are blue from, I’m sure, Pixy Stix or Baby Bottle Pops, and both our faces are spotted with pimples in part from, I’m sure, Pixy Stix and Baby Bottle Pops.

“It’s so”—teenage-me gasps for breath—“not funny!”

Aimee shakes her head slowly, still cracking up.

I didn’t think so at the time, but hearing our voices now, we sound so young. Goofy and unselfconscious. High pitched and silly.

“Okay, let’s never show this to anyone, ever,” teenage-me says, turning off the video. It freezes on my phone as it ends.

You’re a famous actress now. Do you think the fame has gotten to you?

It’s strange that this fantasy came true. For me. I am a famous actress. Has the fame gotten to me?

Not in the way people mean.

In that video, I was seventeen years old, and I was about to get into the college of my dreams. Avalon School of the Arts, a small but highly renowned art school in Ireland, known for its theatre program. Hence the borderline-insulting stereotyping in the video.

Aimee and I had fallen in love with the school together, and we had both applied at the same time, with the same expectations: that we’d both get in, live there together, succeed together, and then be famous together.

But that wasn’t what happened.

I got in. Aimee didn’t.

We had sworn that if one of us got accepted and the other didn’t, then whoever did wouldn’t go. We’d attend our backup school together, which we’d definitely get into (and we did). But once Aimee got wait-listed for Avalon, she insisted I go anyway, tearfully telling me she couldn’t live with herself if I didn’t.

But we’d promised each other. So I stayed in Florida with her. I stayed, and we went to college twenty minutes from home.

Staying in Florida, not going to Avalon, was probably the biggest mistake of my life. Which means that this video of Aimee and me, which I know to be about three days before we found out she didn’t get in, is possibly the last time I was truly happy. Except for the moments between finding out I got in and that Aimee didn’t. It was delusional to think both of us would get accepted, but at that age and time it just felt like really shitty luck that we didn’t.