The baby fat is gone from her cheeks, and she has more freckles than she ever had. And there’s something about her that looks more lived in. She doesn’t have dramatic wrinkles or anything, but there are soft laugh lines around her eyes. She’s holding a candle to her nose and breathing in the scent with her eyes shut and a placid smile on her lips. It’s so weird to see her like this after not seeing her since we were teenagers.

A memory comes to mind—one I haven’t thought about in years.

For my eighteenth birthday, almost exactly twelve years ago, Aimee and I drove to St. Augustine, a cute little historic town south of Jacksonville. It was only a few hours away, and we drove with the windows down, cranking our sing-along playlist. On it, there was a healthy dose of the best Beatles songs to sing with, some top-forty stuff, throwbacks like Britney and Ace of Base, the Evita soundtrack (the Patti LuPone one, not the Madonna one), the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack (the movie, not the Broadway show), and a smattering of songs from the Twilight and Hunger Games soundtracks, which anyone of our generation will tell you were actually bomb.

We stayed at a hotel on Vilano Beach and took a five-minute cab ride to dinner at Cap’s on the Water. We ate fried shrimp and chicken tenders and a slice of key lime pie each, and drank virgin strawberry daiquiris. She did not tell the staff to sing me the “Happy Birthday” song, because there is nothing worse than that and we both knew it. I like attention, but the birthday song is … no.

After dinner we went to the historic district and ate fresh fudge and tried on ugly hats and sunglasses, even managing to stuff down some pizza later on. We got flirted with by some surfer dudes and then freaked out when they asked us to go to a party, so we ran away squealing.

We went back to the hotel that night and took a bottle of champagne my dad had given us out to the darkened beach, where we sat for hours getting silly and loud and laughing about nothing and everything, drinking straight from the bottle (never as easy as it looks with increasingly warm champagne), taking pictures with my digital camera, and talking about boys and TV as the ocean relentlessly reached for the shore and pulled it under, grain by grain.

It was the first night I felt like a real adult. I wasn’t, of course—we were teenagers and we were acting like it. But checking into a hotel, paying a check at a restaurant, having a bottle of wine on the beach—it all felt so grown-up. Our childhood was in the rearview, more and more every day, and the future was looming before us.