In Chapel Hill, spring came early and always smelled like honeysuckle and asphalt. It was 1991, and Maggie Dalton had just turned seventeen. She lived off Estes Drive, in a split-level house where the living room had UNC basketball posters that had been up since Dean Smith’s heyday. Her dad was an obsessive Tar Heel, her mom worked part-time at the Ackland Art Museum, and Maggie? Maggie just wanted out.

At East Chapel Hill High, Maggie was known mostly for two things: her cassette collection and her Honda Civic, which had a cracked sunroof and bumper stickers that read Save the Planet and R.E.M. Was Better Before Green. She wasn’t a rebel—at least not loud about it. But she kept to herself, wrote in spiral-bound notebooks, and spent most of her time at the Schoolkids Records shop on Franklin Street. Her favorite place, though, was the hill behind Kenan Stadium, where she’d go after school to sketch and listen to the college radio station, WXYC, through a battered Walkman with one working earbud.

One March afternoon, while waiting in line at Sutton’s Drug Store for a cherry Coke, she met David Kim, a junior who had just moved from Greensboro. He was quiet, wore oversized flannel button-downs even when it was warm, and carried a camera everywhere. Maggie noticed he was reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and without really thinking, blurted, “That book ruined me in the best way.” He looked up, blinked, and smiled like she’d just spoken the secret password to an invisible club.

From then on, they became a sort of Chapel Hill folklore—Maggie and David. They weren’t exactly dating, but everyone knew they were something. They’d sit under the dogwood trees near the Bell Tower after school, swapping mixtapes and talking about dreams that felt too big for a college town. David wanted to make films, told her he saw the world in frames. Maggie just wanted to get to Seattle, or maybe Asheville, anywhere the air didn’t smell like pine and potential disappointment.

Their spot became the rooftop of the Varsity Theatre on East Franklin. David found the ladder one night after a screening of My Own Private Idaho, and every Friday, they’d climb up with a blanket, a thermos of coffee, and a portable tape player. They’d lie there, looking up at the Carolina blue sky, talking about the future like it was already a memory.

But May came fast. David’s family was relocating again—this time to Chicago. His dad had taken a research position at Northwestern. They didn’t make it dramatic. No big last kiss or promises to write letters. Just one final mixtape, labeled Rooftop Ending, handed to her in the parking lot of Merritt’s Grill, along with a roll of photos he’d taken of her that she hadn’t known about.

Maggie didn’t cry. Not until she played the tape that night in the Civic, parked under the stars at the top of Laurel Hill. It started with The Cure’s “Pictures of You,” and then a crackly recording of David’s voice saying, “You’re gonna make it out of here, Maggie. Just don’t forget the sky.”

Years later, when she was living in Asheville and working at a little bookstore with a view of the mountains, she’d still think about that rooftop. About dogwood trees and used record stores and spring days when the sky felt like anything was possible. And once in a while, she’d pop in that tape and remember what it was like to be seventeen in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—with the sky above and the world waiting below.