One weeknight, Aimee was over for dinner and to watch the most recent Twilight movie with our moms (we had already seen it, but they hadn’t). They were downstairs drinking wine and making spaghetti and salad and garlic bread and talking about Real Housewives, par for their course. Aimee and I were in my room on my computer, dreaming of our future and playing on that website. We were debating, in important tones, the value we put on class and campus size, on- and off-campus housing, in versus out of state, whether we wanted to take on loans or not. In-state, each of our parents could pay for. But it also meant staying in Florida. Out-of-state opened up the whole world.

One of us said something about the whole world and that’s when we realized we weren’t even looking out of the country. And that’s when, after factoring in small class sizes and a focus on acting, we came upon Avalon.

We did a lot of saying, wait … wait … wait, this is perfect … wait … ohmigod … and then we went downstairs to tell our moms everything we had learned about this place that was so perfect that if we didn’t go then we would literally die, could we please go, please, please, please?!

The answer, like with any out-of-state college, was that if we were willing to get our own financial aid, we could do whatever we wanted.

We took this as practically being accepted on the spot and jumped up and down and hugged each other, then couldn’t stop talking through dinner or the movie. So our mothers released us from girls’ night, probably with some relief that they wouldn’t have to endure more lip-biting from Kristen Stewart, and we went upstairs to go look up everything the internet had to offer on the town and the school.

That’s pretty much how it carried on for the rest of high school. Only, thinking about it now, I can see that Aimee’s excitement tapered off after a while.