“Good. I’m glad.” I look out the window for a minute. We drive past all the low houses that seem the same as one another, but for the little windows with golden glows inside revealing different lives. Different cars parked outside. Grill smoke coming up behind some, teenagers in bikinis sitting out front of some, kids playing out front of others.

The song on the radio changes to Freddie Mercury’s cover of “The Great Pretender.”

We pass the place where the End of Summer Carnival is held every year. Where the fortune teller gave Aimee and me our destinies. The field is empty now and so much smaller than I remember. Just off a small road near a Publix grocery store and the Tex-Mex restaurant where I spent my sixteenth birthday. We’re only a few miles from the intersection where the accident happened. I bet that’s also smaller than I remember.

“How did you know this was the right place for you?” I ask.

My mom laughs. “My best friend is here.”

She doesn’t seem to think much of her comment. She looks out the window too, in one of those cheerfully unappreciative moments we all have where we aren’t thinking about how it all might be taken away and instead we’re just living in it.

My eyes well up with tears and I nod. “That sounds like a pretty good reason to me.”

EPILOGUE

The restaurant is loud and festive, and everyone looks their best. It’s the season for maraschino-cherry-red lipstick, sparkling jewelry, and pretty clothes hidden under big, warm coats. It’s Christmastime in London, and everyone was right when they said it would be magical.

I quit Brilliance a week after returning home to Florida. A week after that, I saw that the show had been canceled. According to Vulture, which did an in-depth article on the rise and fall of the show, it’s because of my departure, but I know it’s not.

Not that I’m not going to let everyone else think that.

I ended up staying in Florida for a few months with my parents, slipping surprisingly easily back into the role of being a kid, complaining about being asked to do laundry and dishes, sunbathing all day, eating chips and dip as a meal. I watched movies with them, my mom saying “Oh, for Pete’s sake” every two seconds whenever we watched something too artsy, my dad reliably falling asleep every time we watched a rom-com. I ran errands I didn’t feel like running. I went over to Aimee’s parents’ house a lot, and they came over too. We grilled and I drank wine with the grown-ups, like I thought I would one day.