Michael Wasserman, a virtual stranger, is still staring at me, but he hasn’t walked away yet. I take this as a good sign, or at least as a sign that all is not lost. Yet. He nods his head slowly. “Mrs. Shapiro.” He edges our carts out of the line of rabid shoppers desperately foraging for dinner at the nearby whole-roasted-chicken counter, then speaks slowly, a memory gelling with each word he adds: “She lived next door, with two girls, so her house was full of arts and crafts stuff. We sat at her dining room table the night before the diorama was due and she helped me do the whole thing.” He pauses, then smiles, all teeth. “Actually, she did the whole thing while I just watched.”

I’m as sad now for him as I was years earlier. “I didn’t mean to bring up a painful memory.”

“I’d completely forgotten about the diorama until now. Clearly I’d blocked it.”

As a crowd at a frozen pizza sample counter continues to gather, we move our carts out of the way again.

“So what did you do after I destroyed your diorama?”

“I became an orthodontist.”

“No way.”

“I know. So boring.”

“Are you kidding? When you’re a writer there’s nothing boring about a normal career with a steady income.” I haven’t self-identified as a writer in ages and I have no idea why I did just now.

“That’s right,” he says, smiling again. “Congratulations on all your success!”

I wave him away. “That was such a long time ago.”

“Was it really?”

“It feels like it. It feels like a million years ago!”

“Well, my kids loved the book. And the show. I used to tell them that I knew the girl who created them, that I sat next to her in Hebrew school.”

I roll my eyes. “The girl with the bird on her head.”

“That’s not how I remember it. I remember you being the supercool girl that I was too scared to talk to.”

“Shut. Up.”

“Remember what you used to say to the principal when he told you to smile? You’d say, ‘It’s my face.’” He laughs. “It’s my face. That was really something.”

“Smiling was not part of my skill set back then.”

“Well, you’re smiling now.”

I blush, then look in his cart: cereal, organic macaroni and cheese, peanut butter. “Tell me about your kids.”

He taps his phone and then shows me—three adorable dark-haired children in various stages of toothlessness, against a backdrop of epic foliage. “This was a few years ago. They don’t like to be photographed now. They’re in their tweens now.”

“They look just like her,” I say, with a wry smile, remembering Janie Levy. She was the prettiest girl at the temple, and she and her twin brother, David, were the bat mitzvah circuit heartthrobs. I remember Michael and Janie dating around the time of all those awful parties, her perfect hair and his perfect teeth, neither of them needing braces, and how awkward and unsightly the rest of us seemed by comparison. “I can’t believe people actually marry their Hebrew school sweethearts and live happily ever after.”