The year is 2006.
Middle school has happened (school dances in the cafeteria featuring “The Chicken Dance” and “Cotton Eye Joe,” Big Foot pizzas from Pizza Hut, Grammar Rock videos, worm dissection, general awkwardness). High school has come and gone, too (musical theater, tennis, a friendly German roommate at boarding school, academic success driven by a fixed mindset and the internalized need to live up to the “gifted” label, a longing that won’t be fulfilled for a cute and bookish yet still popular boy to somehow exist among the riffraff and come a-wooing). The girl is now a coed at a college in rural Minnesota, and she is currently watching an ill-advised yet thrilling escapade involving a snowy hill and a canoe at the top, filled with her friends and angled toward the frozen creek at the bottom. She will not participate in the canoe tobogganing herself, but she will run down the hill with a blanket after the canoe breaks the ice of the creek and her friends get drenched in icy water in the middle of February. They will shiver and laugh, and this will be one of many memories that will be referred to again and again over the course of years. This will be a joyful era. The Garden State soundtrack will be played countless times; there will be a three-fingered rating scale for inappropriate jokes; a BMX bike will be dubbed “Timmy” and getting to ride on its pegs around campus will be a real treat. There will be cake fights and fake birthday parties and buzz cuts and moonlit streaking. The girl will be a real member of an a cappella group and a sketch comedy troupe - both of which her friends will playfully mock - and an honorary member of the girls rugby team, who will inadvertently break her bed towards the end of senior year. Throughout it all, whenever they are hungry, they will order an emergency pizza. They will almost all be gay, it will turn out.
These are solid crewmates. The girl will find that they remain on board, even as some find cabins on the other side of the ship, far from the daily goings on. They will become partners and parents, and the girl will find it heartachingly beautiful to see that these college-aged idiots have somehow, in the blink of an eye, become mature, thoughtful adults, who are every bit as funny and irreverent as they were twenty years ago and who still make fun of her in the best way. Every once in a while, she will take a stroll down to the engine room, or wherever they’re hanging out, and it will be just like old times, laughing about a canoe in a frozen creek.