I was about to say, “Like an egg that’s been leaned on,” but something inside said shut up. I shrugged instead.

A small slow grin moved his mouth up. “You know, but you’re not admitting it.”

I panicked. Did he know I was playing dumb just for him?

“It’s okay to know things. I just know different stuff.” He smiled mysteriously, looked away.

After class I kept my eyes down and gathered my books as slowly as possible. That way there would be no chance of walking out of the room at the same time he did.

“I’m sorry.”

I stood still and closed my eyes. He was behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t need to because he came around and stood in front of me.

“Sorry about what?” I couldn’t look at him.

“About what I said. Do you think you’d ever want to go out with me?”

All I remember about that moment was I could actually feel fate’s wheels turning inside me. In the split second before I answered, I knew everything would now change, no matter what.

“You want to go out with me?” I tried to make it light and sarcastic so I would be in on his joke if there were one.

His face was expressionless. “Yes. You don’t know how much I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

We were inseparable for the rest of the year. He was everything I wasn’t. For the first time in my life, I learned with increasing joy that different could be complementary. We had worlds we wanted the other to see. Somehow those very different worlds fit together.

Remarkably, we never slept together, which was one of the great mistakes of my life. James was the first man I ever loved with an adult heart. To this day I still wish he’d been my first lover instead of a handsome forgettable goof I said yes to a month after I got to college.

I never asked about other girls before me, but contrary to his reputation, James never did anything I didn’t want. He was gentle, loving, and respectful. A sheep in wolf’s clothes. On top of that, he was a wickedly good kisser. Don’t get me wrong—just because we never did it doesn’t preclude a few thousand delicious hours horizontal, hot, and hungry.

Because we were such different souls, he seemed delighted by my prim, skirt-down-over-the-knee worldview. He knew I wanted to be a virgin when I married and never tried to force the issue or change my mind. Maybe because he was so used to girls saying yes to everything he wanted, I was like an alien to him—something peculiar, worth studying.

As is so often the case, our relationship ended when we went off to different colleges in different states. Those first months apart, I wrote him furious, impassioned letters. He responded with only stupid two-line postcards now and then, which was perfectly in keeping with his bad-James part. Gradually college and its different faces, as well as the rest of my new life’s diversions, slowed my letters to a trickle. When we saw each other again that first Christmas vacation home, it was warm and tender, but both of us had new lives elsewhere. Our reunion was more nostalgia than building toward any kind of future.

Over the next years I’d heard things about James from different sources, but never knew which were true and which third-hand information. Someone said he worked in a boatyard, another that he’d finished college and gone to law school. If the last was true, he became a very different J. Stillman from the one I had known. They said he lived in Colorado, then Philadelphia; he was married, he wasn’t. Sometimes when I was restless in bed at night, or low, or just dreaming about what might have been, I thought about my old love and wondered what had happened to him. The first thing that came to mind on reading the invitation to our class reunion was James Stillman.

For old times’ sake, Zoe and I had dinner at Chuck’s Steak House. We’d worked there together as waitresses one summer and walked home late all those warm nights with nice tips in our pockets, feeling very adult. Chuck had died years before, but his son took over and kept the place looking exactly the same.

Earlier, Zoe had said she had many things to tell me, but since that afternoon a kind of delicious time warp had set in. Both of us were content inside it talking mostly about then and little about now. A half hour sufficed for catching up on where we were in our lives. This was to be a weekend for memories, photo albums, “Whatever happened to…?” and the sighs that come with remembering who you were. At dinner neither of us expressed much interest in talking about what we’d become or where we hoped to go with our lives. Perhaps that would have come after the reunion—a natural summing up after seeing old classmates and putting the weekend and the experiences into context. But as things turned out, that summing up was done for us.

After Chuck’s, we returned to Zoe’s house. Both of us were dying to get into the tent, our old mood, those times. We hurriedly washed, changed into our pajamas, and by the hissing light of the Coleman lamp, talked until two.

The next morning she got up before I did. The first thing I remember about that momentous day was a violent tugging on my arm. Not knowing what was happening, I tried to clear my head and sit up at the same time. I forgot I wasn’t in a bed but wrapped in the cocoon of a sleeping bag. Held on all sides, I started thrashing around, which only tightened the bag around me. By the time I extricated myself, my hair was standing out from my head, my face was heated to two hundred degrees, my pajama top was wide open.

“Miranda!”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Are you all right?”

Early as it was, I went instantly on the defensive. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. The way you were thrashing around. And everything you talked about last night, the way you see things now… You have such a good life. You’re successful and you said it yourself; things’ve worked out. But you’re not happy. The way you talk—”

“How do I talk, Zoe?”

“Like you’re old. Like you don’t expect anything better to happen because you’ve lived too long and seen too much to have any more hope. I’m luckier than you. I don’t think life’s very friendly either, but I know we can control hope. You can turn it on and off like a spigot. I try to keep mine on full blast.”

“That sounds good, but what happens when things go wrong? What happens when you’re disappointed time after time?”

“It kills you! But you go on and when you’ve got the strength, you start hoping again. It’s our choice.” She reached over and took my hand. It made me very uncomfortable.

“Maybe I’ve just learned to be careful.”

“Would careful you have the guts to fall in love with a James Stillman today?”

The question was so accurate, so right into my bull’s-eye, that I started crying. Zoe squeezed my hand tighter but didn’t move.

“I saw a woman last week in a wheelchair by the side of a road. Right there on the side of the L. A. freeway with all these cars zooming by. I was so frightened for her. Out in the middle of nowhere. What was she doing? How did it happen? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her and I didn’t know why until right now.

“It was me, Zoe.”

“You? How?”

“I don’t know. Her helplessness, the danger, the wrongness of her being there. The longer I live, the more careful I get. It’s like you stop using certain limbs because you don’t need them, or because you only used them as a kid to swing on trees. Then one day you realize you can’t even move that leg anymore—”

“And you end up in a wheelchair.”

“Right, but even that’s okay because everyone else around you is in one too. Nobody we know climbs trees anymore. But sooner or later we come to the freeway and we’re alone; no one to help and we’ve got to get to the other side. We’re stuck, and it’s dangerous.”