“Red is Cameron’s favorite color,” Gray explains. He and Di Anne made the sign together and have been at the center for hours, I can see. The bulletin board is already more than half filled with photos, postcards, and drawings. In one corner, Gray has pinned the album jacket for Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection, the record that’s been the soundtrack of their friendship over the past two years. He found and talked to all of Cameron’s teachers, some of whom have saved copies of papers and poems. One from fifth grade was called “Ginkgo Leaves”:

Flat balloons. Parachutes.

Each leaf like something burning.

A dream taking flight. I stand

Under the yellow tree and think

about yesterday. Does yesterday

think about me?

I read the lines feeling my throat grow tight. It’s more than good writing; it shows a vulnerability I wouldn’t have dreamed of revealing when I was her age, particularly about the past. I wasn’t that brave then. I still might not be, not in that way.

“She’s special, right?” Gray says from behind me.

“Yeah, she’s special.”

With Gray and Di Anne’s help, I work in the things I’ve brought with Emily’s permission, the crayoned drawing of the chameleon—Dear Mom, I have been missing you!—the Malibu beach picture with the pearly pink seashell, and several more, including one of Cameron and Caitlyn Muncy, each wearing a single roller skate, their hair done up in tight high ponytails that tipped to different sides, as if they completed each other.

“Gosh, they’re sweet,” Di Anne says as she pins up the picture. “I don’t remember Cam at that age.”

Cam.

“I talked to Caitlyn Muncy like you asked,” Gray says. “She wasn’t a bitch at all. She cried.”

“Cameron must mean a lot to her, too,” I tell him.

“She gave me this.” Gray holds up a VHS tape. “Is there a way to play it?”

We dig around in the back room and find a cache of AV equipment, slide-wheel projectors, an old reel-to-reel, a Betamax player, and then bingo. A VCR.

Plugging it in, the three of us gather to watch on an old Magnavox in the tiny kitchen. Nearby, along the windowsill under skewed venetian blinds, there are grayish drifts of dead moth husks. A dry sink is filled with cracked pieces of Fiestaware. Then the TV set hums to life, and none of it matters. The room disappears.

Cameron and Caitlyn are singing “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid into Mr. Microphones, giving it all they have. The ponytails are in full force, Cameron’s nearly to her butt. They have the half-formed look of preteens, not yet grown into their faces. They have pimples, braces. They’re radiant.

“This is perfect,” I tell Gray, feeling emotional and overwhelmed.

“I don’t know if she’d want us to play it for a bunch of people.”