You’re driving through the beginning of a snowfall that will probably bring at least a foot, the road already white with salt, slippery with cold in some places. The black Chrysler PT Cruiser is a shape a car probably shouldn’t be. An incredibly small frame, rounded front, rounded roof, four wheels grazing the pavement that doesn’t feel that far away. You look at the gray dashboard, coated in an array of stick-on gems, making the car clear it belongs to Elias. The passenger seat is empty, but you remember when Jonah sat there earlier that day. When he said that if the airbags went off, those gems would become shrapnel and could impale you. So, while you’re alone in the car that freezing afternoon, you rip off every gem you can reach while still having a hand on the wheel, while still paying attention to the road. Because the road is slick and icy and what else are your hands supposed to do?

* * *

You met Elias when he was “Emma's friend” when he was years away from being able to drive, when the black PT Cruiser was just a twinkle in his eye. You were in the same 5th grade homeroom and already friends with his best friend Emma. Elias was lanky, with swooping brown hair, a beanie for every day of the week, and little square-framed glasses. You were both a little old for American Girl dolls, but in the privacy of your green and blue painted room, you and Elias spent hours painstakingly brushing their plastic hair, your legs going numb from sitting on the floor too long. After a few months of friendship, you were invited to Elias’ house. It was a big honor. You met his mom, and she fed you a sandwich with a type of cheese you couldn’t pronounce. He showed you the dress-up bin full of femininity and tulle and feathers. He showed you the photos of him wearing gowns. You don’t remember what you said but you remember you were excited and happy and proud and lucky to be a part of this little world. And the two of you just kept playing with your dolls.

* * *

You can’t remember the first time you met Jonah, but as Elias’ twin brother, he was someone you always knew of. Jonah was a bit shorter than Elias, the same brown hair and eyes, but his smile was a bit more mischievous, and his hands covered in blisters instead of glitter and paint, from weekends spent at the climbing gym. One of your earliest images of him is a vague memory of him getting into a fight with someone in kindergarten about killing a spider. Or him climbing a tree at the writing camp you both did over the summer. When you went over to Elias’ house, he would be in the nook upstairs, playing with his magic cards. Sometimes, when Jonah could tell you might be getting tired of playing dress up, he would try to pull you away from Elias to play this game that was basically just creating a story. You’d pile onto the L-shaped red couch in their living room and lay out the notepads and cards on the table. But you always spent hours just developing characters and fighting over the lives these strangers would live. You never got to the actual playing part of the game. You never actually made a story.

* * *

Junior year of high school, Elias got his own car. He paid for it with the money from his Bar Mitzvah and you were jealous, but humble about it. Enter the black Chrysler PT Cruiser. He couldn’t drive you around, because of the strict rules in Maine about driving with a new license, but you counted down the days.

Junior year of high school, you and Jonah were entering your third year of being in homeroom together. You caught up most days around lunch, listening to his funny stories and asking him for advice on the boy you had a crush on. You still look back at the note Jonah wrote in your yearbook that summer, where he said he was thankful to be your friend too, not just Elias’ brother. You read that note over and over.

That spring, Elias took you to Prom, because no one asked you. All your friends had dates. Elias was going with his friend Brennan, and you called him on the phone and told him he was gonna have two dates. He showed up to your door with a handmade corsage, his fingers having painstakingly woven wire and greens and yellow roses together. You wore a red dress that everyone was jealous of. It was tight and covered in beads and backless. You hoped all the boys would regret not asking you. You hoped their eyes would linger on you, would wonder what you were doing after prom, if they should ask you to dance.

Elias still had a month left of not being allowed to drive other people, but he insisted on driving you to Prom in his PT Cruiser. You were nervous about breaking the rule, but you decided to try and be chill for one night. You drove two towns over with the windows cracked and the heat on. It was late April and still looked like winter. Elias blasted the radio, the bass shaking his car. Brennan sat in the backseat, and you swallowed back the feeling of intrusion. At prom, Jonah danced with a girl who was also in a red dress. You wondered why his hands were on her back instead of yours. You ended the night in Elias’ basement, sleeping bags, candy wrappers, dresses draped on the floor, and two bottles of fruit flavored champagne. You didn’t even drink a sip because you were anxious about what alcohol could do to you and were worried about ruining your prom night by being anxious. Jonah wasn’t at the house that night. He spent the night at his girlfriend’s, freezing his ass off with the “popular kids” in a tent all night. When you woke up the next morning, Jonah was already home and asleep in his bed.

* * *

In early winter of senior year, you and Jonah scrambled your way along the frozen side of Barter’s Creek. You had a camera in hand, ready to shoot his senior pictures. Jonah wore a soft lavender sweater, and you told him to not look so upset in the photos. You pretended like you knew what you were doing with your Dad’s Nixon camera, and you positioned Jonah in various places, trying to get the lighting right. When you were done, you both sat in the cab of your truck, holding your frozen fingers up to the slowly warming vents. Jonah told you there was no rush to get the photos to him, but you knew that they were due to the yearbook staff in a couple of days. You knew he didn’t know that.

A couple weeks later, school was canceled. And then canceled again. You were stuck inside, antsy and anxious and confused. You and your friends passed the cold March days with FaceTime calls and meet ups in the high school parking lot. Elias decked out the back of the PT Cruiser, so he could sit in it in the freezing parking lot. It had blankets and pillows and hanging banners.

Jonah and Elias spoke at your high school graduation, or rather, recorded a video of themselves that was sent out to the town. Jonah was the class president and Elias was the Salutatorian. They talked about the warm feeling of being accepted in your small town, of being a part of a community that they initially didn’t think they would belong in. You ended the day in the green water of Barter’s Creek, swimming with the boys until the sun set, until the bugs came out, and you went back home.

* * *

The following winter, you and Jonah and your two other friends spent the month of February in a rental house together. All of your colleges were still online, so you escaped your parents for a few weeks, filling a small wooden house with bottles of booze and board games and various other belongings stolen from home. Elias was away at school in New York, and suddenly, it was just you and Jonah. Something about the uncertainty in the world, the close quarters, the clock ticking before your nineteenth birthday; it made you bold. You played the long game for a whole month, the snow outside piling up, making the claustrophobic house, even darker, even smaller, and for once just once, you thought maybe Jonah’s eyes were lingering on you a bit longer. You laughed while he cooked your dinner, letting your eyes beg without embarrassment, letting drunk whispers fill his ears. And the world was shut down and everything was suddenly different, and you felt older and how much longer were you going to wait. Two nights before your nineteenth birthday, two nights before you and your friends moved out of the house, Jonah knocked on your bedroom door after the others had gone to sleep. He asked if you had been flirting with him, and you panicked because how was this happening. You had been caught in the act. He sat on the edge of the bed, and you told him he could kiss you if he wanted. And he did.

* * *

Sophomore year of college, you’d leave your dorm when a phone call came in from California. One night when it was raining, you walked across campus in your yellow raincoat and tucked yourself under the roof of the white stone building to talk on the phone. You asked Jonah what his school was like out in LA, if he was making friends, made fun of him when he told you he was a newly declared theater major. Jonah asked what you were writing in class lately and you lied and made up something. You didn’t tell him that it was about your first kiss, your first kiss with him. You didn’t tell him that you had just turned in a story about the summer prior, when your nights were spent at his house, Elias away in New York City for the summer. How you’d stay at his house until it was too late, but sleeping over wasn’t allowed. So, he’d drive you home in the Black PT Cruiser, left behind by Elias for the summer. And you’d stare at the little analog clock on the dashboard and knew that time would pass too quickly, and you wanted to kiss him a bit longer. Over the crackling of the phone, you didn’t tell him the season change felt like a cruel way to end something that was so summery and sweet and warm. Something you’d hoped for, for a long time. You tried not to sound like you missed him on the phone, tried not to think about the other girls he might be meeting. You tried to unwrite what had happened between you and go back to being friends. Just friends.

* * *

The winter of sophomore year, you got on a train by yourself for the first time and rode it three hours north to New York City. Elias met you at the train station in his platform boots and hugged you after too many texts and phone calls and days apart. He carried your overpacked suitcase up the four flights to his apartment. It was like his childhood drawings and costume bin had come to life. The walls were hidden by clothing racks, weighed down with years of collecting vintage clothes. The first night, you let him dress you up like an American Girl Doll; do your hair, your makeup, pick out your outfit. While you got ready, he told you about the projects he was making in art school, the professors he thought were a waste of time, the friends he was trying to make. It was freezing that night, and you layered multiple of Elias’ jackets on top of the outfit. The wind whipped down the narrow streets and you ran to the bar a couple blocks from his Alphabet City apartment. Everyone at the bar knew Elias, the bouncer who let you in for free, the bartender who gave you shots without even checking an ID. The mundanely dressed late 20-something-year-olds watched you and Elias drunkenly dance in the middle of the bar, your stomachs full of the amount of tequila that had allowed you to get out of his bed and out onto the freezing streets of the city.

The next morning, piled up under blankets in Elias’ twin bed, he told you Jonah was seeing someone at school. You nodded off the pain, trying to be present in that February morning, trying to finally let that summer go. It made sense; Jonah was always the boy with the girlfriend. You felt like an interlude.

* * *

Early May, after your sophomore year of college, you and Jonah sat at a table outside the little coffee shop in your town. You were the first two of your friends home for the summer. It was still cold out and nothing was blooming yet. You and Jonah sat behind your laptop screens, under the guise of going to the cafe to write, your shared passion. But mainly, you just talked. You didn’t ask him about his girlfriend, and he didn’t say anything about her. Jonah is the best listener, and he sipped coffee while you unpacked your semester. You were friends again, two writers, two fans of Elias, two kids from the same hometown. You were glad for the space you had put between him, the other lips that had grazed yours in the past year, the new friends, the moments without the twins. You knew with every passing day, what had happened between you would feel more and more like the past, as you settled back into friendship. Maybe that was just how things were supposed to be.

* * *

The summer after Junior year of college, you and Jonah and Elias were all home for a few weeks at the same time. You went to your favorite taco restaurant, got tipsy off of one margarita, and walked all the way back to the Temple where Jonah had parked the PT Cruiser for free. Your stomach felt full of food and your heart felt even fuller with each of the boys on your side. The night ended at their house, where you once again piled onto the red couch. Their mom lingered about, trying to catch details that each of you spilled about the last year. You wanted the boys to know about everything that had happened that past year, the past about three years you’d been apart. But you couldn’t tell them everything. There was no way to share every party, every class, every new face, disappointment, excitement, adventure, fear. In a way, you knew that missing details were meant to be just that, missing.

* * *

Two days later, you are sitting in an Adirondack chair in your backyard. Elias calls you and tells you PT cruiser died that morning. It just decided to stop working. You pretend to cry while he laughs. He says his dad is going to take it to the mechanic and see if he can get some money for it. You say it’s the end of an era. Elias says he’s going to need a ride to your house that night.