I always showed up to the memorial wearing one of her old baby-doll dresses, waving like a pageant queen at the same collection of faces I saw every year, greeting them with exuberant hellos and tight-squeezing hugs. It was incredible how much they all started to like me when I learned to do this for them. They loved knowing that the dress I wore was Marley’s, and how honored I was to have it. I would always say some variation of: “Wow, I know, I can’t believe I’m almost as old as Marley was,” which would make them pat me on the cheek with a tender hand. Adults were always obsessed with my age, my growth, my transition into womanhood. With every passing year, I’d get to change how I phrased my signature line, until finally, year five, I was preparing to say things like, “I can’t believe I’m older than Marley was,” which should’ve made them sad, but would only make them amazed, I knew. It was as if all of us didn’t age in the year that passed. Only me. And that finally growing older than my dead friend was something worth smiling about. For good measure, I’d planned to throw in a “Yes, I do hope Nick Cline turns his life around, you know, to pay respect to Marley. He’s lucky he was just a kid.”

There were tales of the real Marley right under my tongue, dissolving into my spit until they disappeared. It was a pill I choked down every time I went out in public. These were the unwanted truths. They carried too much weight. I tried once, at the start of the first memorial, to share them, and I was met with nothing more than teary stares and sympathetic pats on the back. The weather called for year-round sunshine in Cadence. So I never made mention of the things I held closest, like the time Marley put melatonin pills in the heart-shaped sugar cookies she baked for her homecoming dance.

“I don’t know what this will do, but it seems appropriate,” she’d said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it.” She kissed my nose, dusting me with flour. When we put the cookies in the oven, we danced while we waited for them to bake. She twirled around me as I waltzed across the kitchen, the two of us pretending to be different people with different lives, trying on accents and attitudes and memories that didn’t belong to us.