“Now and Then. We’re burying a time capsule like Now and Then.” Danny tilted her head so her entire pose screamed disaffected youth like it was an old album cover. Except her eyes were too bright and her smile was a little too giddy to pull it off.

“That movie doesn’t have a time capsule.” This was from Imogen.

Danny glared, immediately on the defensive. “Well, it should have.”

“Guys.” Rinn was keeping the peace this time. “It was a good idea.”

And then they all three busted up laughing. At a private joke that nobody really got but everyone had to immediately understand belonged to all of them.

And then Rinn jiggled the camera, and Eli realized she was putting her phone on a tripod and she was setting up a new shot. She looked at the camera, winked, and said, “We’ll be right back.”

And then they were all walking off, back toward what had once been Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium. What was now an empty, dug-out pit.

The patron saints of gentrification worked fast.

One day it was a historical building. The next it was a giant hole in the ground—to be turned into a multilevel parking lot attached to a multiuse living-shopping-dining experience extravaganza.

Eli watched as the girls receded from the frame.

Three girls walking out into a construction site and attempting to make it their own. A place that had once been theirs but was now beyond leveled and covered with CAUTION KEEP OUT signs and fencing and all sorts of barriers and cues that told them they no longer belonged.

But instead of staying away, they were burying their secrets on the site. Sure, everyone would know about it, so it wasn’t really a great place to bury secrets. But after this video, nobody would be able to access the construction site again for a while. Or, at least, that was how Danny had explained it.

Eli hadn’t believed it. But it was still a good shot—the Chicago skyline at dusk behind the silhouette of three girls as they slowly walked toward the sunset.

“Perfect,” he said. “Well. Almost perfect.”

Three girls, linked arm in arm. The girl in the middle was holding the box filled with whatever it was they wanted to bury there and remember. Whatever they felt had to be essentially itself forever and whatever they felt they might forget if they didn’t bury it there in that spot, for the earth to protect it from whatever time would do to it. They had told no one else what was in that box. And then there was a shadow in the background that almost looked like a headless girl wearing roller skates.

Eli laughed—he had been wondering where the roller girl had gone.