Claire looked at the photograph. Then she looked at her friends. Maggie’s hands were dry and cracked from too much dish soap at the restaurant she now managed. Leo’s hair was thinning. Paul had a small scar above his eyebrow from a bicycle accident last year. They weren’t young. But they were here.
They did and they didn’t. Maggie was tugging at a lumpy sofa, her red hair now a sensible bob, her freckles faded. Leo, who’d once sworn he’d die in this very apartment, was carefully wrapping his vintage guitar in bubble wrap. He’d sold his first song last year—a jingle for a breakfast cereal. And then there was Paul.
They laughed. It was the same laugh. The same four people, folded into the same easy rhythm. For a moment, the storage unit wasn’t a tomb of old things. It was the living room again. It was 1994.
They sat on the floor, leaning against boxes. The radiator in the storage unit didn’t leak, but the cold seeped through the walls. They passed the bottle. The whiskey burned, just like it used to.
Outside, it started to snow. The first snow of 1994 had been the night they’d all decided to stay. This snow felt different. It felt like permission.
“What would we tell them?” Leo asked, staring at the photograph. “The twenty-two-year-old versions of us?”
“Tell them to buy Microsoft stock,” Maggie said, and they laughed.
Paul looked at her. The same tilt of the head. “Tell them they were right to take the picture,” he said. “The memory is the only thing that doesn’t get packed away.”