THE BEST OF TIMES

THE BEST OF TIMES is both the inscription on Hollis’s inexpensive picture frame and a phrase that gathers changing meanings as Auden’s summer in Colby progresses. First it seems to describe a life she has not lived; later it becomes a test of what counts as a memorable time, and, when she finally has pictures to choose from, a promise she does not have to consider fulfilled yet.

The Frame and Its First Meaning

Hollis sends the frame from Greece by way of Tara, who brings it to Auden’s home. A plain brown wrapper bears Auden’s name and address in her brother’s slanted handwriting. The small glass frame is dotted with colorful stones, and its inscription runs along the bottom beneath a photograph of Hollis standing before the Taj Mahal. He wears cargo shorts and a T-shirt, carries a backpack, and smiles with the relaxed ease Auden recognizes as his own.

The gift’s appearance initially makes the phrase feel almost absurdly confident. Tara presents it as a thoughtful present from Athens, where she and Hollis found it at a flea market, and explains that picture frames make a memory more special. Auden politely calls it beautiful, though her private reaction is that a picture of the giver makes for a narcissistic gift. The distance between her courteous answer and her judgment gives the frame an early double character: it is a sentimental object offered in good faith, but it is also conspicuously cheap and centered on Hollis.

That first impression deepens when Auden examines the frame alone. At eleven, while her mother’s visitors are still gathered downstairs, she sits in her room checking her Ume.com page and email. There are no messages on the site and only one email, from her father asking how things are going. She considers calling a friend, then remembers the awkwardness of her recent social outings and stays in her room. The frame on the bedside table gives that solitude a physical focus: its jaunty inscription sits beside Hollis’s smiling travel photograph, while Auden cannot think of a picture from her own life to put inside it.

The contrast is not simply between staying home and traveling. Auden imagines her old friends exchanging stories about the school year—not grades or classes, but gossip, boys, and heartbreak. Those experiences feel as foreign to her as the Taj Mahal. Her friends, she thinks, could fill the frame with a million pictures; she has none. Hollis’s portrait therefore becomes an unwitting measure of the social and emotional experiences Auden believes she has missed. Yet the backpack also suggests movement: she cannot leave for Greece or India, she reasons, but she can still go somewhere.

Hollis Explains the Inscription

When Auden later speaks with Hollis, she remembers the picture frame in her duffel bag and repeats that she loves it. Hollis immediately recognizes that she does not. His frankness reveals that the frame’s ungainliness was deliberate: he calls it cheap and ridiculous, and says he chose it because, unlike the money, savings bonds, or new cars she might receive from other people, it would be memorable. He recalls other frames at the market, decorated with sayings such as HELLO FRIEND!, PARTY QUEEN, and CRAZY PERSON. The alternatives make the object’s clumsy humor part of the gift rather than a flaw Auden has mistaken for sincerity.

More importantly, Hollis rejects the idea that THE BEST OF TIMES should describe one fixed moment. The photograph can be changed, he points out, so the inscription need not belong to one memory forever. There can be many best times, each better than the one before. Auden hears in this casual explanation a depth he associates with Hollis: a thought he seems to have arrived at spontaneously nevertheless alters the meaning of the gift. The phrase stops functioning only as a boast attached to his travel photograph. It becomes an open-ended standard, one that can accommodate later experiences instead of comparing every moment with a single perfected past.

The conversation also makes the frame a small instrument of connection between the siblings. Auden tells Hollis she misses him, and he answers that he misses her too. He proposes sending another frame, the one labeled CRAZY PERSON, so she can put his photograph in it beside the first. The joke does not erase the distance between them, but gives them a shared language for it: the objects are ridiculous, recognizable, and capable of holding a picture that matters because of who is in it.

A Phrase Shared and Reclaimed

Later, the inscription reappears in a scene about the summer before college. Leah asks what happened to the summer of new experiences and great memories that she and the others expected to have before they were apart. She cannot quite finish expressing what that summer was supposed to become. Auden supplies the phrase: the best of times. Leah recognizes it and repeats the question of what happened to that promised summer. The phrase has moved beyond the private meaning of Hollis’s present. It now names a shared expectation against which the group’s actual summer can be felt as uncertain or disappointing.

The interruption matters. As the others fall silent, Eli appears in the open kitchen doorway and says not to ask him; he has only come for the hot dogs. The scene does not resolve Leah’s question, and the phrase does not magically make the summer conform to the promise. Instead, the contrast between the grand expectation and the ordinary arrival of someone seeking food gives the words a lightly ironic edge. A best time is not necessarily announced or recognized while it is happening.

That possibility becomes personal when Auden looks at Eli and imagines touching his hair, with the momentarily vivid sense of his skin, her hand, and his hands at her waist. Adam raises a camera and calls for a smile; the shutter catches them, but Auden suspects she may never see the photograph. Even if she does, she knows it cannot contain everything she feels. Still, the frame comes to mind as the right place for it: its blue stones and familiar inscription could hold a picture connected to a moment whose significance exceeds what the image can show. The photograph’s limits do not make the memory meaningless; they distinguish the record from the experience it preserves.

An Empty Frame and an Unfinished Future

A later conversation with Hollis complicates the travel image that first filled the frame. He tells Auden that he works at a bank, initially hired as a teller and moved after a week to the customer-service desk, where he handles account changes and safety-deposit applications. Auden struggles to picture him behind a desk. What she can see instead is the photograph of him grinning in front of the Taj Mahal, backpack over his shoulder, and she wonders whether that was the best of times. The question unsettles any simple equation between travel and a fulfilled life: the iconic image remains vivid, but it does not answer what Hollis’s life feels like beyond the photograph.

By the time Auden is packing to leave for school, the frame has survived months in her room and finally has a practical purpose. She now has several possible pictures: one from the prom, some with Maggie, Esther, and Leah in their last days in Colby, or one with Hollis and Laura on the day they announce their engagement. The abundance reverses the earlier emptiness. At the start, Auden could not name a single picture of her own that belonged in the frame; now she has several distinct relationships and occasions to consider.

She nevertheless leaves the frame empty. The choice is not a return to her earlier sense that she has no memories, nor a rejection of Hollis’s idea. It follows from having too many possibilities to settle on one. By not selecting a final image, Auden keeps the inscription from being assigned permanently to the prom, her friends, or her brother’s engagement. THE BEST OF TIMES has become less a label for a completed peak than a future-facing promise: Auden may yet find another moment worth putting there, and she does not have to know in advance which one it will be.