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her ear. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “That would have sucked! They were Grammie’s.” She took the earring from me and skillfully stuck it back in her earlobe. “She died last year.”
    “I’m so sorry,” I said.
    Myra smiled. “Remember how we used to go over to her house after school, and she’d always have frozen Thin Mints and those little plastic barrel bottles of orange drink?”
    I laughed. “I remember those bottles! The stuff inside always tasted the same, no matter what the color was.” I don’t know why I wasn’t telling Myra the truth. It was awful of me. It was fraud. But it felt so familiar to talk with her, to reminisce about things, even if we really weren’t talking about the very same memories.
    “Your eyes look so different without those green contacts,” Myra said, studying my face. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to find me out or not. “No one had the heart to tell you that they didn’t make your eyes look green. They just made them look weird.”
    I remembered how desperately I wanted blue contacts when I was a kid. My mom told me my eyes were too dark for them anyway. Where was Jessie’s mom? How come no one told her she couldn’t drink sugar water or spray chemicals in her hair or wear colored contacts? I wondered what it must have been like to be Jessie Morgan.
    “We should go,” Myra said. “Or we’ll hit traffic.”
    I knew it was wrong, but instead of confessing to Myra that I was actually Jenny Shaw, I said, “I guess I don’t have to call shotgun if it’s just you and me, right?” Back in high school I never bothered to call shotgun—I was usually just happy to be invited along for the ride on the rare occasion that one of our neighbors offered to drive me home from school—but I’d wanted to shout it. The word always stuck in my throat like a big lump. I’d spent most of my high school social interactions with that same kind of lump in my throat, tears just about to spring up in my eyes.
    “Ha!” Myra said. “Remember that? You and Karen used to fight!” She grabbed her purse from behind a plant in the corner of the room. “I’ll finish setting things up when we get back.”
    “I can help,” I said automatically, like the part of my brain that was supposed to think before it let me talk had been completely disabled.

“O h my God! You know what I have?” Myra said, after we got into her rusty old Honda. She reached up to pull a disk out of the CD sleeve attached to her visor.
    “What?” I asked, as I buckled myself in to the passenger seat. The buckle took a few tries, and there were crumbs and little bits of gravel in the upholstery. It felt familiar. Like my car. No matter how hard I tried to keep it clean, my car always ended up filled with random dirt and cereal-bar wrappers.
    “This!” She shoved the disc into the CD player. The opening chords of “Bust a Move” thumped through the car’s ancient speakers. “Bust it!” Myra shouted, laughing. “Oh, come on! Don’t pretend like you don’t still love this song!”
    “‘Love’ is kind of a strong word,” I said, laughing, “but I do remember most of the words.”
    Myra bounced around in her seat while she drove, stumbling over the words as she sang along. She was so comfortable with me, and even though I knew it was because she thought I was someone else, her level of comfort made me feel comfortable. When the song got to the part about Harry and his brother Larry, I chimed in with Myra until our singing degraded into a fit of giggles.
    The song ended, and we fell into a lull of looking out the window. It must have been a mix CD. The next song was that weird one by Crash Test Dummies. I hadn’t heard it in years. The fog had cleared and there was a mountain on the horizon where I hadn’t even imagined a mountain would be.
    “So, he really dumped you at the airport,” Myra said.
    “Yeah,” I said, watching for more surprise mountains as we got closer to a giant Tully’s sign