Then the next thirty-six hours go by in a haze.

We rehearse from early in the morning until the wee hours. We eat cheese and crackers and protein bars and drink endless water as we sweat beneath the stage lights, running scene after scene, again and again.

The set is complete, the starry sky functional, the fake grass covers the stage, all the props are ready. It now looks so much like Aimee’s childhood backyard that my heartbeat flutters when I first see the bizarre reproduction. It’s both unnerving and strangely comforting.

Another memory, long buried, comes to mind as I look at the set.

Suddenly I can smell the charcoal of the grill and citronella in the air. The rattling and chirping of spring peepers and cicadas in the boggy trees and the sound of a James Taylor CD playing from the kitchen. My parents sitting at the table drinking red wine and snacking on Tostitos chips with queso and salsa; Aimee’s dad drinking beer from a green bottle, wearing an apron that said Never Trust a Skinny Cook, and her mom refilling her own glass of wine and enthusiastically telling a story about the time she got stuck overnight in the Atlanta airport and wound up talking all night to a nice man who—she didn’t realize until later—was George Lucas.

Aimee and I were drinking pink lemonade out of unbreakable stemless wineglasses and sitting with bare legs in the grass, tugging at blades and talking about people at school, scratching absently at mosquito bites. Young enough and comfortable enough with discomfort not to care about the way the grass and bites made us itchy or the way our scratching might leave scars on our ankles one day.

Aimee leaned over to me, pointed at our parents, and said, Do you think that’ll be us?

To which I remember replying, Married? Which sent us both into hysterics.

We were twelve years old, preoccupied mostly by the impending birthday that would give our age a teen at the end, the boys in our English classes who seemed to finally know we were alive, and the fact that Halloween was only a few weeks away and we still hadn’t decided what to be yet. We didn’t make a proclamation about our futures like sage children in a Steinbeck novel. I think we knew, without doubt, that it would be us one day. We’d grow up, we’d know other grown-ups, and we’d eat snacks, we’d like wine, and know everything.

The memory is interrupted by the intense collision of another one. The first and last time I went into Aimee’s backyard after she died. It was dark and quiet, almost like the frogs themselves knew to be reverent. It was empty and vacant, the smell of charcoal and the sound of the radio long gone. Aimee, gone.