It’s been over a year since I last heard from Isabelle.

She sent me a postcard a couple months after she left, the way people do when they’re pretending they’re going to stay in touch, and I remember taking it out of our beat-up mailbox at the end of the road, and how the sight of her swoopy handwriting in red fountain pen made my heart beat faster for a minute. Isabelle always writes in red so that all her days will be red-letter days, and she uses a fountain pen because it’s elegant.

Elegant was always one of Isabelle’s words.

Today the mail was a couple of bills and a schoolteacher magazine for my mom and a flyer for a sale on fence posts at Tractor Supply, which looked like a good deal if you happened to want fence posts. Nothing from Isabelle.

I still have that postcard though. It has a big full moon on the front, the picture side, with a bunch of little animals dancing in front of it. A couple of rabbits and a dog and a cat and a cow. On the back she wrote, “Looks like us, doesn’t it? Remember the Moon Elves!” with a couple of kisses that didn’t mean anything and then her name.

Isabelle.

I remember the Moon Elves.

I remember everything about the summer Isabelle was here.