What happens when the mother of your best friend in high school reappears twenty-five years later to ask you what was in her daughter's pockets the day she was hit by a train? After receiving that enigmatic, painful email, the narrator, who as a verbena band singer goes from town to town performing songs she detests, digs into her memories to recover her adolescence and put together an answer from them. Using music as the common thread, she conjures up the adventures she lived with Carla, their rebelliousness, the discovery of sex, and an overpowering desire to live in the Valencia of the 1980s. In this way, the narrator puts together her memories up to Carla's death and its aftermath, when the melody and her own innocence died at the same time.