The theater begins to quiet as the lights go down, and Aimee whispers, “Places!”

I stand on shaky legs and go to my spot.

Aimee stands in hers.

The audience is completely still, waiting for the resolution of the cliffhanger we left them on.

The lights rise. Someone coughs.

“Do you remember now?” I ask, as Lola.

“Tell me what happened,” she says. I can see that she’s fighting back the emotion—she’s unblinking, face unmoving. “What happened, Lola?”

I grit my teeth and tell her.

“We were fighting. We were at the party and you didn’t want to be there. I was having fun, but you weren’t. You wanted to get home to go meet—your boyfriend.” I rub my face with both hands. “Your boyfriend—Leo.” Oh my God. So uncreative. The Titanic and Theo of it all. “I was mad at you because you were always ditching me for him. You were always ditching everything for him. And he was such a jerk and such a loser—sorry.”

I feel guilty, knowing that Theo might piece together enough to be hurt.

She gives one clipped shake of the head. “No, go on.”

This is the worst. The actual worst.

“I—well, it was my fault,” I shut my eyes and then blink a few times before going on. “I was screaming at you. I was nineteen, I had zero handle on my emotions back then. And I was yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like you weren’t, I don’t know, you weren’t hearing me. I wanted you to listen to me for once. You wanted me to be quiet and—”

How much do I actually have to tell her? Do I have to confess to everything?

I ground myself and then go on.

“You told me to be quieter, but you were screaming it at me too, so I cranked up the music as loud as I could and I wouldn’t let you turn it down. It was only a few seconds but someone ran a red light and we didn’t … we didn’t see them coming.”

“And then…”

The pause is heavy.

“You … d-died instantly.”

I resist the visuals entering my mind. Her body in that awkward, unnatural position. The mangled driver’s-side door. The almost undamaged car that hit us. The driver’s anguish.

“I remember now,” says Aimee, starting to cry, trying to keep the tears at bay. “It was raining.”

This is true. And I haven’t told her this part. I hadn’t remembered that part. God, it was pouring, how had I forgotten that?

The scene plays out again in my head: the winds were rushing, her hair blew not in a breeze but in whipping winds that cycloned through my open passenger door and her shattered window.