The Girls From Ames Part 3

Karla isn't one of those mothers who spoils her children or gets overly involved in their lives. It's just that her love translates into an urge to spend total time with them. For years now, on Sat.u.r.day nights, she has never felt compelled to go out for dinner and drinks with her husband and some other couple. "I'd rather spend Sat.u.r.day nights with my family," she says. The other girls understand this about her, even if it makes Karla a wet blanket.

Here at Angela's, the girls discussed drawing straws to see who slept where and who'd share a bed with whom. But even before partners were chosen, Kelly agreed to sleep in the downstairs bedroom with cranky Karla. "I'm the only one brave enough to stay with you," she says. Karla smiles slightly and doesn't argue the point.

Throughout the weekend, there are flashes of the bubbly, funny Karla they knew when they were kids. But there are times, also, when she's obviously subdued or a bit disconnected.

Kelly thinks everyone is giving Karla a little more room to be cranky. "She wants quiet, we're quiet," says Kelly. "She wants to sleep, we try to let her sleep." The girls have been doing this for a few years now, a slight indulgence-actually, an act of love-that has become an unspoken agreement.

Karla dismisses this. "That's Kelly," she says. "She thinks she knows . . ."

Whatever the case, Karla is tremendously grateful to all of the girls. Her intermittent crankiness aside, she is well aware that they have been in her corner when she needed them the most. Through the hardest moments of her life, their devotion to her has been tested, and they all came through. That's why, though she'd like to go to bed, and she'd like them to shut up already, and a part of her would like to get home to be with her kids, she's here, on the porch, with them.

Like Marilyn, Karla was born into circ.u.mstances that set her apart from the other Ames girls. Marilyn was a baby who was desperately wanted; after all, her father had reversed his vasectomy to have her. In a way, Karla's arrival in the world was the mirror opposite of Marilyn's.

She was born on April 25, 1963-just seventeen days after Marilyn and nine days after Jenny-in the same maternity ward at Mary Greeley Hospital. For the five days that followed, Karla was brought to her mother's side for every feeding. Her mother held her, nursed her and talked to her. And then, on the sixth day, her mother gave her up for adoption and disappeared from her life.

Now, as a mother herself, Karla finds it almost unfathomable that a woman could nurse and hold a child through all those feedings, and then walk away. That image of abandonment would remain with Karla, informing the woman she became. Decades later, with her own kids, she became a mother who was willing to sleep by their bedside when they were sick, to hold their hands for as long as they needed her, to skip Sat.u.r.day nights out to be with them.

Growing up, the Ames girls were always intrigued by the story of Karla's birth. They didn't dwell on it, but it was there, in the back of their minds.

As teens, seven of the girls, including Karla, worked together at Boyd's Dairy Store. One day a woman came in for ice cream. She stared at Karla, almost as if she knew her. "She kept looking at me and looking at me," Karla recalls. Everyone noticed. Finally, Cathy broke the silence by saying, "Hey, maybe that's your biological mother!" There were laughs all around after the mystery woman left, though Karla's laughter was more self-conscious. The woman never showed up there again.

Karla knows little about her biological mother, except for tidbits shared by nurses on duty the day she was born. They said the woman was a doctoral student at a college out of town; she came to Ames because her sister lived there. Her pregnancy was the result of an affair with a married professor who was Catholic and had several children. On the night Karla was born, the professor came to the hospital.

Whether or not the woman was also Catholic is unclear, but the professor had asked that she not have an abortion. It was important to both of Karla's birth parents that they find adoptive parents who were college-educated. The professor had some kind of double doctorate.

The day before Karla was born, the phone rang at the home of Barbara and Dale Derby. Mrs. Derby recalls the moment with remarkable clarity, right down to the type of cookies she was baking when the call came: chocolate chip. The birth mother's doctor was on the phone. He said he had talked to a local attorney, who knew that the Derbys had been looking to adopt. The doctor explained that an available baby would be born, possibly within hours, at Mary Greeley Hospital. But this offer, out of the blue, came with a stipulation. "We can only give you ten minutes to decide," the doctor said. After that, he'd offer the baby to another couple.

Unable to have children of their own, the Derbys had just adopted a little girl the year before, from an orphanage. Did they really want another baby so soon? Mrs. Derby hung up the phone and ran outside to find her husband, who was weeding in their garden. She told him about the surprise phone call, the ten minutes to decide, the urges within her to have another child.

"Well, we'd want a boy," Mr. Derby said. "How do we know this baby will be a boy?"

"I don't care," Mrs. Derby said. "I want this child. Girl or boy, I know this is our baby."

Mr. Derby took a breath, told her that if she wanted another baby, girl or boy, then so did he, and sent her running back into the house. Perhaps seven minutes had pa.s.sed. Mrs. Derby called the doctor back. Yes, she told him. Yes, they'd take the child.

She was so nervous that she could hardly hold the receiver in her hand. It was shaking against her ear. She asked if the birth mother had been getting prenatal care.

"Do you want this baby?" the doctor asked. "If you do, don't ask questions."

In terms of education, the Derbys fit the criteria requested by the biological parents. Mr. Derby, being a bridge designer, was a civil engineer. Mrs. Derby had a business degree and worked for the phone company. And because this was an adoption that wouldn't be going through an agency, it was put together without great formality, in the small-town way that things were done then. The nurse who brought Karla to the Derbys' home had no paperwork. She just handed Mrs. Derby the baby and one extra cloth diaper, then wished her well and drove off. Karla was wearing a thin little dress she'd been given at the hospital. Mrs. Derby stood there, tears running down her cheeks, holding tight to Karla and that extra diaper.

It would take a year for the adoption to be legal. So for twelve months, Mrs. Derby feared that the biological mother would return and take Karla away.

During her childhood, Karla felt comforted to know that several of the Ames girls had a connection to her adoption. There was Marilyn, whose dad, as Karla's pediatrician, helped facilitate the paperwork that permanently placed her with the Derbys. There was Jenny, who was born at Mary Greeley Hospital the week before Karla. In those days, new mothers remained hospitalized for seven days or more; "veterans" with week-old babies would be recruited to push around the juice carts and serve the newer mothers. Karla liked to imagine her biological mother and Jenny's mother crossing paths or talking-or even rooming together. But Jenny's mom has no recollection of meeting the birth mother.

Over the years, Mrs. Derby tried to locate the woman. Her full name was on Karla's birth certificate. Mrs. Derby would go to the Ames Public Library to look through old phone books and city records, trying to figure out what became of her.

Then one day about a decade ago, Mrs. Derby came across an article in a newsletter she received through work. The author had the same first and last name as the birth mother. There was a photo of the author, a full body shot of her walking. She looked so much like Karla-tall, thin, striking-and the way she was walking, her gait, was also so completely Karla. The moment Karla saw the photo, she was certain. "I know that's her," she told her mother.

The woman's article was about how cancer was prevalent in her family. She had lost her mother and a sister to breast cancer, and another sister had also been diagnosed with the disease. The article detailed the author's anguished decision to have both b.r.e.a.s.t.s removed as a precaution, even though she had no sign of cancer.

Understandably, Karla was upset by the article. If this woman was her birth mother, what cancer risks had Karla pa.s.sed on to her three children? She went to the doctor to be tested and was told she showed no signs of cancer. Still, the uncertainties raised by the article remained with her.

Mrs. Derby felt 99 percent sure that she had found the right woman, and one night she worked up the courage to call her. The woman answered some questions, declined to answer others, and was vague about several points. She insisted she was not Karla's mother, and Mrs. Derby ended the call without confirmation that her suspicions were true. Karla, however, needed no convincing.

"We found her. That's her," Karla said. "But she never wanted me and she now wants nothing to do with me. All I'd want from her is a medical history. I feel that's what she owes me. And if she's not going to give me that, then we'll have to live with it. You're my mother. I don't need her."

Karla's relations.h.i.+p with the other ten Ames girls began forming in infancy. She and Jenny were babies together in the same church nursery during Sunday services. They'd take naps in adjoining ba.s.sinets.

Karla met Diana at Fellows Elementary School. Diana was the prettiest girl in the popular group, and Karla would see her playing with her other pretty friends at recess. "Those of us in the unpopular group, we were in awe of them," Karla says. It wasn't just that the girls were pretty. It was how they carried themselves through recess, with this air of confidence, no matter if they were on the swings or playing kickball or just standing around talking.

Karla tiptoed her way into Diana's popular group in seventh grade at Central Junior High. There was a boy-girl party and, somehow, she and Jenny were invited. Karla couldn't believe her good fortune. She thought to herself, "Wow, we've finally made it!" The party turned out to be a mind-opener for them. Right there on the couches, boys and girls were making out in plain view. Hands were everywhere. Kisses were long and wet. It was so much more than Karla expected. She was too overwhelmed to partic.i.p.ate.

Karla remained painfully shy and insecure around boys for most of her childhood. That partly was because she was flat-chested longer than the other girls were. She was taller, too, and that felt like a handicap. In the presence of boys, she didn't know what to say, didn't feel smart, couldn't always articulate herself, didn't realize she was as beautiful as she was. Kelly thought that Karla never tried too hard to make herself appealing to boys. When other girls were discovering their s.e.xuality, Karla seemed to be holding it at bay.

She ended up going to her share of junior-high and high-school dances, but they were always affairs in which the girls got to ask the boys. She'd get up her courage, ask a boy to be her date, and by the end of the night, she'd have another formal, five-by-seven portrait-of her and a boy, all dressed up, uncomfortably holding hands-to place in her sc.r.a.pbook.

When she was with the ten other Ames girls, Karla was far more self-a.s.sured. She had a sense of humor that was self-deprecating, with few inhibitions. For the girls' amus.e.m.e.nt, on demand, she could stick her entire fist in her mouth. No one in Ames-certainly no girl-had that combination of a small hand and a large mouth, and if they did, no one was as willing as Karla to prove that one fit into the other.

Karla was sometimes the goofiest, most fun-loving of the Ames girls. Before they had their driver's licenses, several of them tooled around town on those mini-motorcycles called mopeds. One Halloween, Karla swiped a large carved pumpkin from Karen's house. She put her head through the hole in the pumpkin, looked out through the carved-out eyes, and was able to mount her moped and drive it over to Cathy's house, with Karen riding in back. As she pulled up, she looked like some crazy half-human/half-pumpkin escapee from Planet Jack-o'-Lantern. Cathy's mother saw them coming and couldn't stop laughing.

Karla was also a bit of a pop-culture princess, always eager to apply things she read about in her teen magazines, or saw on TV, to the lifestyles of Ames inhabitants.

When the movie 10 10 came out in 1979, Karla convinced the others that Karen, who had the longest hair, needed to get the full Bo Derek cornrow treatment. It took the girls hours to get the job done. "She looked so great," Karla recalls. "She was shaking it all around. She thought she was really hot." Soon enough, that didn't sit well with the others. came out in 1979, Karla convinced the others that Karen, who had the longest hair, needed to get the full Bo Derek cornrow treatment. It took the girls hours to get the job done. "She looked so great," Karla recalls. "She was shaking it all around. She thought she was really hot." Soon enough, that didn't sit well with the others.

Someone had to say it: "Who the h.e.l.l does she think she is? Bo Derek?"

Karen was taken aback. She was swinging her hair around mainly to give her cornrow-installation team a thrill. "When I finally saw myself in the mirror," she says, "the cornrows were so crooked. Some were big. Some were small. My hair didn't look like Bo Derek's at all." She didn't have the heart to tell the girls that, even after they decided she'd gotten too full of herself. Eventually, Karla figured out the dynamics and owned up to it. "I guess the rest of us just got jealous. Sorry."

Back in the seventies, aluminum-colored reflective tanning blankets were advertised on TV, and Karla, who always had the best tan in the group, decided that she and the other girls needed to buy some.Karen, Karla, Diana and their prom dates One spring day, Sheila, Sally and Jenny skipped school with her and they all sat in her backyard, tanning on those weird sparkly silver blankets. They looked like they were lying on flattened astronaut suits. It was a short-lived adventure, however, because Karla's father caught them and-they couldn't believe he'd be such a party p.o.o.per-turned them in to the school princ.i.p.al. Their aluminum tans faded, but the detention slip was proudly displayed for posterity in Karla's ever-growing sc.r.a.pbook.

For Karla, sc.r.a.pbooking was risky business. On the one hand, she wanted to doc.u.ment everything going on in her life. On the other hand, if her parents came upon the sc.r.a.pbooks, they'd have evidence of things she didn't want them to know about. In the end, her urge to preserve her memories almost always won out, and so she became a sc.r.a.pbook risk-taker, pasting in everything from notes pa.s.sed between her and the other Ames girls (about real and humorously imagined liaisons with boys) to photos of everyone holding a beer at a party.

In one sc.r.a.pbook, she had photos of the girls sitting in a sea of stoned Iowans at a Ted Nugent concert. In another, she posted photos of her dad's car covered with huge clumps of mud and cornstalks. There was a story behind that one, of course. She had just gotten her license and, with Sheila riding shotgun, had accidentally driven the car into a ditch. A farmer happened by on his tractor and pulled out the car, but by the time he got it back onto the roadway, it looked like it had been swallowed up by a cornfield. Karla and Sheila hosed it off with a few hundred gallons of water from the garden hose. "My parents can never find out," Karla told Sheila. "Never. This car has to be spotless!"

Still, she couldn't resist taking before-and-after photos so she could show all the other girls proof of the adventure. And after she carefully preserved the memory in her sc.r.a.pbook, she casually left it lying around her room.

Her parents never went through that sc.r.a.pbook, though they weren't completely in the dark about things. Karla's mom recalls a night when several of the Ames girls' mothers decided to meet at a bar. They shared stories and compared notes, had a few drinks and some laughs. "We knew the girls were doing some things we wouldn't want them to do," says Mrs. Derby. "But we knew they were good girls inside, and they were good for each other. They'd be OK."

From the time Karla and the other Ames girls were in their early teens, they always tried to get jobs together. Each job carried its own secrets or naughty moments or lessons learned. Several summers when they were in junior high, the girls worked together deta.s.seling corn. What sounded like a wholesome summer job was actually hot, dirty, itchy labor-the hardest work they had ever done in their lives. It was also an eye-opener for them. The older boys on the crew would gather among the farthest cornstalks to smoke pot. And their crew leader was a woman with enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s who, after dark, was a champion wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest winner.

Later, when they were fifteen, the girls found jobs that were easier and more fun. Karla and six of the others signed on at Boyd's, the ice-cream shop famous for its big plastic cow out front. The girls often had the run of the place. Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, the owners, weren't always there, nor was the manager. So the girls often felt a rush of power-as if they controlled all the ice cream in Ames.

In the late 1970s, Channel 5 in Ames had a promotional campaign for the station, showing upbeat scenes around town. There was a catchy jingle with the station's motto: "5's the one!" For one spot, the film crew stopped by Boyd's and got shots of the girls dipping five giant scoops of ice cream onto one cone.

That was the only time they were filmed at the store. Lucky thing, too. They wouldn't have fared too well if the Boyds had ever installed hidden cameras to monitor them.

When things were slow, the girls would sit on the counter licking ice-cream cones, chatting away. And when things got busy, they could be very magnanimous. They were the guardians of the ice-cream containers, and the cuter the customer, the less likely he was to have to reach into his pocket. Two good-looking boys would walk in. Free ice cream for them. Friends and family would stop by. Cones and malts were on the house. If an entire boys baseball team came through the door, Karla and the other girls would fight off the urge to give them whatever they wanted free of charge. Once, Karen gave her siblings free ice cream, and when her dad found out, he was horrified and told her she had to return her next paycheck to Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, as repayment for all of the pilfered profits.

It hadn't exactly occurred to the girls that their generosity at the ice-cream counter wasn't fair to the Boyds. When you're young and there's ice cream available, you just feel this urge to spread it around.

Usually, enough ice cream was sold to keep the Boyds in the black, but there were times when the girls unintentionally damaged the shop's bottom line. One night after work, Karla and Sally were asked to defrost all of the ice-cream freezers. It took a while, and then they headed to Karla's house for a sleepover. In the morning, Sally asked Karla, "Did you plug the freezers back in?"

Karla replied, "No, I thought you did."

Panicked, they called Mrs. Boyd, who met them at the shop. Sure enough, everything had melted into goop: ten gallons each of twenty-five flavors.

The girls stood there, looking at the goop, staring at their feet. Finally, Mrs. Boyd said, "Well, girls, that was an expensive mistake, wasn't it?"

She didn't make them pay for the lost inventory, and they didn't lose their jobs. But Karla and Sally shared the bond of feeling guilty and stupid and of disappointing Mrs. Boyd.

Before leaving high school in 1981, Sally filled out a Boyd's gift certificate, addressed it to herself, and pasted it into her sc.r.a.pbook: "To Sally Brown: 20 extra thick malts." In the s.p.a.ce labeled "valid for" she wrote: "50 years from date of issue."

The certificate would have been good until 2031-when she and Karla and the others could return as senior citizens for two malts apiece-but it's now unredeemable. Boyd's, which opened its doors in 1941, closed in 1987. Mrs. Boyd died in 2004.

Midway through high school, skinny, flat-chested Karla began to fill out, and the other girls knew that her moment would soon come. They kept telling her that, and they were right. By senior year, she was dating Kurt, an Ames High football player. He might not have been the first boy to notice Karla, but he was the first to show great interest in her, and she fell for him.

Kurt was very attractive and popular with the jock crowd-the sort of fun, macho guy who seemed like a necessary ingredient at a Friday night keg party. He wasn't tall, but he had wavy brown hair, a jock's body and a chiseled face with a nice smile, despite two chipped teeth. He was always a sharp dresser, and he'd drive around town in a white 1975 Monte Carlo, a car celebrated for its long hood and state-of-the-art concealed winds.h.i.+eld wipers.

To his friends on the football team, Kurt could be just plain cool. He had this swaggering self-confidence and a slick way with words. He was always coming up with funny catchphrases that other boys would adopt. Years before it became famous in a Budweiser commercial, he'd walk around asking other guys, "Whazupp????" They'd repeat the phrase back to him, and there'd be laughs all around. "Whazuppp?!?!!" When the beer commercials first came out, those who'd lost track of Kurt wondered if somehow he'd gone into advertising.

Male friends.h.i.+ps are often born on athletic fields, and in Kurt's case, his bonds with other boys sometimes grew out of visceral physical confrontations. At one football practice, there was a scrimmage in which tailback Jim Cornette was pitched the football. Steamrolling right toward him at that moment was Kurt, playing defensive back. It was an almost maniacal charge. "We knew it would be a monster wreck," Jim recalls. The two boys got within a couple of feet of each other and the coach blew the whistle. Both boys stopped. No contact was made. But for two decades after that, as their friends.h.i.+p grew, they'd kid each other. "I would have kicked your a.s.s!" Kurt liked to say. And Jim would answer: "Yeah, right, I'd have flattened you and kept running!"

Jeff St.u.r.divant, the quarterback, was Kurt's best friend starting in junior high. They were always comparing biceps or challenging each other to foot races. Jeff knew Kurt had a temper, ever since that party in eighth grade when a girl broke up with him and he put his fist straight through a wall. But when it came to Kurt, it was all part of the package. "He was very intense, but you were just drawn to him," says St.u.r.divant.

A lot of boys idolized Kurt, and not just for his c.o.c.kiness, his physicality and his sense of humor. They also were impressed that he had been able to woo Karla. By high school, boys were recognizing that she had grown into a beauty, and that she had this loving sweetness within her. Seeing her growing devotion to Kurt, they figured, maybe he also had something special inside of him, something he couldn't easily reveal or articulate.

There were, however, people who thought otherwise. Some girls outside the jock sphere described him as arrogant. As for the ten other Ames girls, they certainly recognized Kurt's charm and charisma, but they didn't tell Karla everything they saw or thought.

Jane, for instance, had a story she chose not to share with Karla. Even though there were few Jews in Ames, Jane never really felt blatant anti-Semitism except once, from Kurt. It happened when she was in fourth grade and a bunch of kids had gathered after school to play kickball. They were picking sides when Kurt announced to everyone, "I don't want that Jew on my team!" Jane never forgot the incident and never told Karla until they were adults.

In eleventh grade, Marilyn wrote in her journal that she felt uneasy watching Kurt lay into his younger brother "for taking some of his munchies." That same day he spilled a beer on his brother for unknown reasons; Marilyn had to take out a hair dryer to dry the boy off. Though Kurt could be great fun, a part of him seemed out of control. Marilyn chose not to articulate any of this to Karla.

Angela knew something about Kurt, too. While he was dating Karla, he wasn't always faithful. Once, even Angela made out with Kurt. They snuck into a bathroom at a party, and it happened. She didn't feel right about it, of course, but she sensed that he probably fooled around with a lot of different girls. All the Ames girls had concerns about Kurt. But at least early on, no one believed Karla would stick with him.

Kurt had other issues, too. He was often mad at someone; there was always a reason. And because he took such pride in his toughness, other boys noticed that he'd often go looking for trouble. Once, after a football game, he got onto the bus filled with players from the opposing high school and started kicking and swinging at them. It was a dangerous decision. To bystanders, it was a surreal scene, as if one crazy guy had decided to declare an unprovoked war on an entire broad-shouldered army. Luckily, he wasn't injured.

Jeff St.u.r.divant became a more devout Christian later in high school, and his friends.h.i.+p with Kurt ended. Still, even though the two boys were taking sharply different paths, he continued to admire Kurt from afar.

Boys in Ames couldn't quite explain their feelings for Kurt or their need to impress him. "For some reason, we all just cared about him," says St.u.r.divant, who ended up becoming an orthodontist in West Des Moines. "I guess it was because we loved him. That's what it was. Even though I never saw him again after high school, as an adult I'd sometimes feel like I was reaching out to him, still trying to get his attention in some way. That's a funny thing, but it's the truth."

As Karla became more involved with Kurt, she began spending all her time with him, which caused tension with the other Ames girls. It's an old story, of course. A girl finally gets a boyfriend and puts him first. In Karla's case, she still wanted to be with her friends, but she wanted Kurt there, too. So the Ames girls found themselves spending more time with him than they otherwise would have liked.

Kelly considered Kurt to be braver, brasher and more confrontational than almost anyone she'd ever met, and she believed that's what made him a good athlete. But she couldn't figure him out. "He'll try or do anything. He's afraid of no one," she'd say to the other girls. "Where does that come from?"

Karla had promised Kelly that after high school, they'd go together to the University of Iowa. They dreamed of establis.h.i.+ng residency in California after that and finis.h.i.+ng school together out there. Instead, at the last minute, without consulting the other girls, Karla decided to follow Kurt to the University of Dubuque, where he'd be playing football.

Kelly felt betrayed. She was also upset that her friend seemed to be choosing a boy over a chance for the best possible education. Just before leaving for the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Kelly went to an all-night party and, afterward, stopped in front of Karla's house.

She sat in her car, scribbling a long, angry note. It was 6 A.M. when she finally placed it on Karla's doorstep. Her basic message, as she recalls it, was this: "You're giving up everything for a guy. You've bailed out on me. And you've bailed out on yourself. It's a big mistake. You're going to regret this decision."

Kelly was right. Karla would go on to marry Kurt, and they would have a daughter, Christie, born in 1990. But Kurt wasn't ready to be a parent or a loyal husband. Karla ended up leaving him when Christie was three months old.

Twenty-seven years later, at the reunion at Angela's, Karla isn't thrilled that Kelly is psychoa.n.a.lyzing her crankiness. When Karla says she isn't feeling well-she has slight flu symptoms-Kelly's diagnosis is that she's homesick. "She's really conflicted about being here," Kelly insists. "She cannot bear to be away from her family. She hates it. And the minute she starts thinking about it, she wants to go home. She gets crabbier and crabbier."

"Kelly is full of it!" Karla later complains to Jane. "She says I'm sick because I'm homesick."

"Don't listen to her," Jane advises.

And yet Kelly and Karla, despite this surface friction, have opted to be roommates. As the conversation between all the girls reaches deeper into the night, Karla can no longer keep her eyes open. She'd rather not be alone in the back bedroom. She wants her friend to join her. "Come on, Kelly," she says, taking her by the hand. "It's time to get some sleep."

4.Sheila

On the second morning of the reunion, Jenny opens her suitcase and pulls out a shopping bag filled with old photos and letters, neatly tied in ribbons to differentiate each decade. There's one photo in particular that she can't wait to show the other girls.

She came upon it a few nights earlier in a closet at her home in Maryland, and at first, she was completely confused. It's a five-by-seven portrait of her and a handsome football player named Dan, taken at the 1980 Ames High Christmas formal. The photo was still in the flimsy brown cardboard frame provided by that night's photographer, who posed every couple in the exact same position.

Jenny had an unrequited crush on Dan for two full years. He'd never shown much interest in her, yet here he was, standing tightly against her in his white tuxedo and ruffled lime-green s.h.i.+rt, his hands in hers, smiling like she was his girl. "Wait a second," Jenny thought. "I never went to any dance with Dan. What is this?"

When she looked more closely at the photo, she figured it out: Dan's full body had been cut out of another formal photo and had been perfectly attached over the head and body of the boy who was Jenny's actual date at that Christmas dance. To the naked eye, it was all incredibly seamless, as good as any mouse-clicking Photoshop user could produce today. Jenny held the photo in her hands for a couple of minutes, trying to do some mental detective work. And then she remembered.

"Sheila," she said to herself, and couldn't resist smiling.

One day back in 1980, Sheila had somehow gotten her hands on the photo of Dan and his real date, sliced Dan out of the picture, snuck into Jenny's room at her house, found her Christmas formal photo, and done some fantasy editing. It wasn't anything malicious; she wasn't making fun of Jenny. As Jenny now recalls: "It was an act of love. It was just her way of saying, 'Here you go. Here's that picture of the two of you that you always wanted.' "

At the reunion, the other girls pa.s.s around the photo, laughing about Jenny's oversized corsage and Dan's oversized bow tie. They peek underneath to get a look at Jenny's actual date in his gray suit. And they think about sweet, scheming Sheila with those scissors in her hand.

All the girls wish Sheila was here with them. It would be so fantastic to hear her recollections of how she doctored that photo. They'd have so much to ask her: What would she remember about the early years of their friends.h.i.+p that the rest of them don't? What would be her take on all of their middle-aged issues?

"Remember how she laughed?" asks Cathy. "It was so great. It was never a put-on, either. When she found something funny, I mean, her laugh was just unaudited."

The girls remember her childhood smile, too. "Sheila always smiled like she had a secret," says Jenny.Angela and Sheila In their heads, all the girls hold on to an image of Sheila, smiling away. The old photos help. But that laugh of hers, that's harder to summon up, and they long to hear it again. It's funny, they say, what you miss most about a person.

In the summer of 1979, Jenny and Karla went on vacation together to California, and Sheila sent them a letter. Almost all of it was devoted to bringing them up-to-date on her boy situation back in Iowa.

First, Sheila wrote, she went for a drive with their cla.s.smate Darwin, and though she was really excited to be with him, "we said absolutely nothing to each other." Later she went to Doug's house with Sally, Cathy and Angela. Darwin was there. "He was being weird and so was I (I was nervous)," so that ended up without much conversation, too. The next day, she talked to "Beeb, Joe and Wally," a three-some whom she described, in order and very precisely, as "new, not cute, and sweet."

The next night, Sheila went to a disco where she "tried to get rid of Steve." Once he was out of the way, she danced with Joe, Dave, Randy and then Charlie. It was a fun night at the disco until one of the guys "got p.i.s.sed at another guy"-over a girl, of course-and started pounding his fists into a wall until they were bleeding. "It was terrible," Sheila wrote, before jumping to a new topic in her next sentence: "Oh, I found someone else to be in love with. His name is Jeff, but he's only gonna be here a few more days."

Sheila apologized that she wasn't able to flesh out all the details of her adventures in this particular letter. To do that, she explained, "I'd have to write a book. Maybe I'll do that when I'm old and lonely, but now I'm young and happy, so I'll just write a chapter."

When Jenny came upon Sheila's letter in her closet, those last sentences jumped out at her because, of course, Sheila never got to live the full book. She was the Ames girl who never became a woman. When her friends think of her and speak of her, she's always age seven or fifteen or nineteen-never more than twenty-two, the age she was when she died mysteriously. In their minds, she remains the carefree, boy-crazy teen they were.