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I met Tess my freshman year of college at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She was from Omaha and had skin and hair like Snow White and long nails painted a fiery red. I was from a tiny town in the woods of Vermont and wore Laura Ashley skirts and L.L.Bean moccasins. We met at the cereal station in the dining hall of our dorm, and even though she was a hair- sprayed Midwestern Catholic girl, or maybe because of those things, I was drawn to her, and we spent nearly every day together. We smoked Camel Lights on the steps of my dorm and talked about boys. We liked boys from the same fraternity and spent every weekend drinking from the keg at their giant fraternity house on the hill. We rollerbladed along the paths through campus and went skiing in Vail on the weekend. We sang at the top of our lungs to Sinead O’Connor and called ourselves “T’amy,” Tess and Amy.

When we returned to Boulder for our sophomore year, Tess and I shared a room in an apartment with two other girls, Kira and Liz. Tess and I shared clothes and food and money. We fell asleep each night side by side, and if I stretched from my bed, I could touch hers. But by the end of the year, I began to feel claustrophobic. We’d planned to stay at school for the summer. Tess talked about the great jobs we would find and how we’d drive to Vail every weekend in the car her stepdad promised if she made good grades. Tess was smart, so we both knew she would get the car, and we dreamed about the freedom we’d enjoy. I let Tess go on and on about how much fun we’d have, but I kept quiet. That same summer my mom would be getting remarried and then moving from Vermont to South Carolina. I was afraid that if I stayed in Boulder, my new stepfamily would go on without me. But I didn’t have the heart to leave Tess, so I let her think I’d stay for the summer. I liked knowing that she wanted me, and leaving my options open; Maybe I didn’t need to be a part of this new family after all.

But in the end, I went home. Tess was mad, mostly because I waited so long to tell her. I felt bad about leaving, but I knew she’d be fine without me.

“I’ll be back in August,” I said. We hugged and cried as I packed up my half of our room, and when she dropped me off at the airport in a borrowed car, I grabbed my bags from the trunk and waved. It was the last time I saw her.

I flew home to Vermont that June to attend my mother’s wedding. My grandparents refused to come, and my sister and stepbrother cried during the service. The pictures from that day are terrible. Mom, Erin and I are dressed in brightly flowered Laura Ashley dresses and hats, and my stepbrothers are in suits. Everyone looks miserable except Mom and Charley, her new husband. After the wedding, we all moved temporarily into a big, fancy house in Woodstock, Vermont that Mom and Charley rented for the summer. After growing up in an old, rotting house that was in a continual state of repair, the big house was thrilling but false. It felt like we were trying to pretend to be something we weren’t. As the oldest child, I got to stay in the small guest house, which gave me physical space from the dynamics of our newly blended family. When I called Tess from my little cottage, the life I’d left behind with her seemed to belong to someone else.

I was struggling to find my place in a family I didn’t choose, while Tess was going to wild parties and hooking up with boys whose names were unfamiliar to me. I didn’t feel connected to anyone. So I began to call her less and less and wrote letters that I never mailed.

In August, I was standing in the kitchen of the big house when the phone rang. It was Liz, our roommate from school who was home in New Jersey for the summer. She said she had bad news and told me to sit down. I laughed, and then she told me that Tess was dead.

I said, “You’re kidding.” It was all I could think of to say. You’re kidding. Of course she was kidding. She had to be kidding.

“No,” she said, “It’s true.” Tess was killed in a drunk driving accident, coming home from a party in Vail on the winding mountain road we’d traveled together. Our friend Cindy was driving the car Tess’s dad gave her because she’d made the grades. Tess was in the passenger seat and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. When they went off the road, Tess flew through the window and died instantly. The car landed in a river. Our friends Kira and Piper were in the backseat and tried to pull Cindy out but couldn’t and had to wait for nearly four hours before they were rescued.

“We would have been in that car,” Liz said.

I hung up the phone and lay down on the couch in the unfamiliar house. It was August, and I would be returning to school in a few weeks to move back into the apartment I shared with Tess. But now Tess wasn’t going to be there. I walked around in a daze, wearing black clothes in the middle of summer. I painted my nails with Tess’s fiery red polish while Mom and Charley packed to move to South Carolina. I mourned for Tess as I followed the U-Haul truck from Vermont to South Carolina. My sister Erin sat in the passenger seat beside me, and I clung to the wheel, flinching at every truck that seemed to pass too close. Sometimes I felt my hands loosen on the steering wheel as if it didn’t matter, wondering why I was spared, but I quickly jerked myself back to attention.

I dreamed of driving each night while I slept in motels along I-95. We drove all the way to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, carving our way under an umbrella of oak trees. Away from the dulling motion of the car, I walked the beach and stared out at the ocean, trying to understand what went wrong. I knew I should have felt lucky that I didn’t stay with Tess in Boulder because maybe it would have been me driving instead of Cindy. But maybe if I was driving, I could have kept Tess safe. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt guilty, forgotten and left behind.

When I returned to school at the end of the summer, Kira told me about the accident. She said that she’d fallen asleep in the back seat of the car and that she remembered waking up at one point because Tess and Cindy were singing so loud to the music on the radio. I wondered if it was a song I knew. They were smoking cigarettes and the windows were open and they were laughing. That was the last thing Kira saw before they went off the road.

It’s been 18 years since that summer, and now I do feel lucky now that I wasn’t with Tess in the car that night. But my best friend lives on forever in my memory as a beautiful, 20-year-old girl singing and smoking with the wind in her hair, and I was lucky to have known her. ­­

Amy S. Mercer is a freelance writer living in Charleston, SC with her husband and two sons.