At the third floor, they got the full whiff of the famous hair salon and then watched a tall, beautiful woman get on, her frosted hair blow-dried to elaborate perfection. Stepping back to make way for her, the two girls exchanged a look behind her back, a grimace and a grin.

If Annie hated her for what she had just done, Susan thought, then she would be alone in the world, as lost as her crazy brother screaming in his dreams.

In the diner, they found a booth near the window. The cheeseburgers were perfect, flat and juicy and turning the soft rolls beneath them a reddish pink. The sweet egg creams, in frosted fountain glasses, might have been a balm for any number of things. They both put their straws in and then drew them out again and licked the white, vanilla-scented foam.

“So, where’d you go?” Susan asked, hoping to deflect Annie from saying, How was it? This morning she would have trusted her not to ask “How was it?” but now, suddenly, everything seemed tentative between them. It was possible Annie hated her for what she had just done.

Annie slipped the straw back into her drink, churned it a bit. Reluctant to speak until finally, she simply said, “I lost it.” For Susan, the thick pad and the cramps and the terrible word-curettage-that set her teeth on edge, all gave way to the sudden descent her heart took. If their places were exchanged, Annie would not have done what she’d done. And there was no undoing it.

Tears came into Annie’s eyes-green eyes now against their red rims. Susan saw her swallow hard before she leaned across the Formica tabletop and asked, whispering, “Do you know she dies?”

Susan felt herself draw away from the question, even as Annie seemed to lean into it. “Catherine,” Annie said. “In the book. Did you know she dies at the end, and the baby’s dead and he walks out into the rain by himself?”

Annie’s voice seemed to twist away from her and she tried to laugh through it, suspecting she would lose it again were it not for the good cry she had had an hour ago, in a deserted ladies’ room some floors below the clinic-a place she had sought blindly, flying (as the receptionist had said) from the waiting room (another pair of women had entered by then, a greenish-looking girl in her twenties and an older woman who might have been her mother) and into a nearby stairwell where the first sob had broken from her throat and echoed so loudly that she’d run heavily down the stairs just to cover the sound with her own footsteps. Out onto another floor where there was, luckily, an empty ladies’ room. She had locked herself in a stall and sobbed for the unbearable sadness of the story: Catherine dead and the baby dead and nothing at all left for him-like saying goodbye to a statue, he had said-but to walk out into the desolate rain all alone.

She had cried for what must have been twenty minutes and then went out to the sink and splashed cold water on her face-knowing she should get back upstairs for Susan-and then began to cry again.

Because it was intolerable: Catherine dead and their baby dead. Intolerable and terrible and made even more so by the fact that within the same hour of her reading, the book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain (despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a nice hotel, a warm fire, a fine meal, love.

She had studied her own young face, blotched with weeping, in the bathroom mirror. Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father’s surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan’s ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. But what an effort it took.

Susan’s baby, she thought, might be better off, after all, never to have been born.

And then she had cried twenty minutes more.

“I’m over it now, sort of,” she told Susan, laughing at herself. “But I really lost it.”

Susan said faintly, “I guess I’ll have to read it.” In all her calculations about what to do, about running away, telling her parents, leaving school, driving to the golf course and throwing herself into his arms, she had not considered dying in childbirth. The baby dead, too. She wasn’t even sure if such things happened anymore. Although she knew the words “even death” had appeared somewhere this morning, on something she’d signed.

Annie pulled some paper napkins from the steel dispenser and held them under her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, laughing. “Spare yourself. You can copy my summary when it’s due.” Then she straightened her spine, threw back her head. She balled the napkins in her hand. “What is wrong with these people? These nuns?” It was an old refrain, but it comforted, somehow, returned them to the time before today. “What is wrong with our school?” It was their friendship’s eternal question. “Why do they pick these depressing books?”

Susan smiled, knowing the tune. “That bridge thing,” she offered.

“God, yes,” Annie cried. “San Luis Rey. What was the point of that?” She held out her hands. “Ethan Frome.”

“Oh, God.” Susan had a napkin to her eye as well. “When they crashed their sled into the tree.”

“Nice,” Annie said.

“Uplifting,” Susan added. It was their old routine. Oh, Mr. Gallagher.

“And the end of Great Gatsby” Annie said. “The blood in the pool from where he’s shot in the head.”

“And then that other guy,” Susan said, warming to it, “in the poem, who goes home and shoots himself.”

“Miniver Cheevy,” Annie said. “And Anna Karenina.”

Susan shook her head. “Couldn’t read it.”

Annie leaned across her plate, emphasizing the words. “She throws herself under a train.”

Susan laughed once, like a cough.

“Madame Bovary!” Annie said.

“Dead, too?”

She nodded. “After about a million affairs.”

Susan shook her head. “Well, of course,” she said. “Sex and death. That’s the message.”

Annie threw the balled-up napkins onto the table. “Christ,” she said, “what is wrong with them? Why do these crazy women want us to read such depressing things?”

“They want us to suffer,” Susan said, sarcastic so that Annie wouldn’t see how much she wanted to cry. “They want us to be afraid.”

“They want us to be nuns,” Annie added, so she wouldn’t have to say, Oh, Susan, oh, my poor friend.

In college, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to be teachers, most of them-industrial or liberal arts the predominant goals since any interest in science or math portended better things: accounting, engineering, med school in Mexico.

Damien’s, where they drank, was not, as Michael Keane liked to say, in the most felicitous part of town: it was an ugly, desolate old house tucked among ugly, snowplow-ravaged streets that were themselves lined with more narrow, sagging houses, bent fences, scrawny trees. There was a sorry-looking baseball field across the street and the edge of a cemetery off the abandoned lot behind. The black skeleton of an old power plant rose up in the far distance, over the field, and you couldn’t get to the place without feeling three, four, maybe five times the rutted thump and bump of abandoned railroad tracks under your wheels. But by their junior years most of them had had enough of the storefront bars on Main Street, the bars along the river and at the lake, the roadhouses and beer barns out past the fraternities. In the paucity of streetlight and house light that surrounded Damien’s, the place could easily be missed-there was only a bit of red neon in the window-and the joke was that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was. Knowing where it was brought all of them that much closer to what they thought of as the real life of the city. As did knowing Ralph.