There was a small backyard that she’d saved for last to show me because there sat the surprise. Pitched in the middle of it was a familiar brown tent that made me laugh loudly as soon as I saw it.

“Is that it?”

Zoe was beaming. “The exact same one! I’ve saved it all these years. Tonight we’re going to camp out again!”

When we were teens, our weekend ritual in the summer was always the same: set up this tent, stock it with junk food and fashion magazines, then spend the night inside gabbing and dreaming out loud. Our houses belonged to our parents, but this old Boy Scout tent in Zoe’s backyard was ours alone. Her brothers were banned from it and we took swift action when they tried to invade. What we talked about in there all those nights was as secret and important as the blood moving through our veins.

I walked over and touched the tent flap. As I held it between my fingers, the rough familiar cloth was an instant tactile reminder of a time when life still made sense, limits were for old people, and James Stillman was the most important person on earth for me.

“Look inside.”

I bent down and peeked into the tent. Two sleeping bags lay on the floor with a Coleman lamp between them. There was a box of Zagnut candy bars.

“Zagnuts! My God, Zoe, you’ve thought of everything!”

“I know! Do you believe they still make them? Oh, Miranda, I have so many things to tell you!”

We went back into the house. She showed me to her daughter’s room, where I changed into cooler clothes. Afterwards she suggested we take a drive around town before dinner and have a look at our old stomping grounds.

Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you’ve been away for years. What do you expect to see? What do you want to see? Having been away so long, you know it’ll be different. Still, seeing the inevitable changes makes quick deep slashes across your soul. Loss, loss. Where are all those places I once was?

Iansiti’s Pizza Parlor was gone, replaced by a store with a postmodern facade that sold CDs. There were only records when I lived here. LPs, not CDs. I thought about all the slices of pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni we’d eaten in lansiti’s, all the dreams and teenage hormones that once filled that dumpy place with its stained menus and bunch of fat-bellied Italian cousins in T-shirts eyeing us from behind the counter.

“Sometimes when I’m driving down these streets, looking at our old hangouts, I think I see myself inside them.” Zoe chuckled and slowed for a yellow light in front of the bank where James’s mother had worked.

I turned to her. “But which you? The one you were, or the you now?”

“Oh, the one I was! I always think of myself as seventeen here. I’ve never gotten over the fact I’m twice that age but still living in this town.”

“Don’t you feel strange going by the old places? Like your parents’ house?”

“Very. But when they died, so did it. A house is the people who live there, not the building. I just wish I hadn’t sold it when the market was so bad. The story of my life.”

We drove by the high school, which despite some new buildings still looked as glum as ever. Past the town park, where, one fifteen-year-old summer night, I almost lost my virginity. Then down the Post Road to the Carvel ice cream stand where James and I sat on the hood of his old green Saab and ate vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate.

Until that moment, I hadn’t been able to get up the nerve to ask Zoe the question, but seeing that cherished Carvel stand was a sign it was time. As casually as possible I asked, “Is James coming to the reunion?”

Zoe looked at her watch and dramatically blew out a breath like she’d been holding it for minutes. “Phew! You went a full hour without asking. I don’t know, Miranda. I asked around, but no one knew. I’m sure he knows about it.”

“I didn’t realize till we started driving around that this whole town is haunted by him.” I turned to her. “I didn’t know how I’d react coming back, but more than anything it’s James everywhere! I keep seeing places where we were together. Where we were happy.”

“Miranda, he was the love of your life.”

“When I was eighteen! I have done other things since then.” The tone of my voice was stiff, prissy. I sounded too much on the defensive.

“Not as much as you think.” She grinned and threw me a quick look. “High school is a terminal disease. It either kills you while you’re there, or waits inside your soul for years and then comes back to get you.”

“Come on, Zoe, you don’t believe that! You had a wonderful time in high school.”

“Exactly! And that’s what killed me. Nothing was ever better than high school.”

“You sound so cheerful about it.”

She chuckled. “Right now I’m looking forward to the reunion because in those people’s eyes, no matter what’s happened to me in the last fifteen years, I’ll always be Zoe the golden girl. The cheerleader with the great grades and the boyfriend who was captain of the football team. And you’ll always be Miranda Romanac, the good girl who shocked everyone senior year by going out with the baddest boy in school.” She slapped my knee.

In a bad Irish accent I said, “Aye, and God bless the boy!”

She raised a hand as if it held a glass and she was offering a toast. “And God bless Kevin. I’m also looking forward to this because I hope he’ll be there. And he’ll be absolutely wonderful, sweep me off my feet and save me from the rest of my life.”

My heart filled so quickly that I couldn’t catch my breath. It was exactly the way I had been thinking for weeks.

I met James Stillman in geometry class. God knows, I knew about him before; he had a reputation fifteen miles long. He mesmerized innocent girls into his bed. He’d once stolen a pair of skis from the town sport shop, then had the chutzpah to return there the next day to have the edges sharpened. He and his friends were reputed to have burned down the abandoned Brody house during one of their infamous parties there. All told, James was not interested in being a solid citizen.

A group of typical thugs had usually slouched around our school halls wearing gaudy leather jackets and intricately piled hairdos that looked like hood ornaments, but James Stillman’s brand of bad was planets away from those human clichйs. What fascinated me was his great, singular style when I didn’t even really know what that word meant yet. Despite his reputation, he dressed like a preppy, in tweed jackets, khakis, and loafers. He listened to European rock groups—Spliff and Guesch Patti—and was even rumored to love cooking. When he was going out with Claudia Beechman, he had a bouquet of yellow roses delivered to her in gym class on her birthday. Like most of the girls in the high school, I watched him from afar, wondering if all the things said about him were true. What would it be like to know him, date, kiss him? But that was academic because I knew the thought of someone as colorless and well behaved as me would never even cross his mind.

“What’d he say?”

Only after a thud inside my brain did I realize that James Stillman had asked me a question. He sat behind me in geometry class but only because seating was alphabetical. Before I had a chance to digest what had happened, he repeated the question, this time adding my name to it.

“Miranda? What’d he say?”

He knew me. He knew who I was.

The teacher had said the earth was an oblate spheroid, as I dutifully noted in my book. I turned and said, “He said the earth’s an oblate spheroid.”

James watched me intently, as if whatever I said he’d been waiting all morning to hear.

“A what?”

“Uh, an oblate spheroid.”

“What’s that?”