In middle school, Roberta’s brown hair was always greasy, parted down the center in permanent wilt, and her face bloomed with acne. “You have a great face for radio,” Jan Stone once told her, leaving Roberta in tears. But then, in high school, Roberta’s skin cleared up. She cut her hair and feathered it like Pat Benatar’s. And when her braces were removed, she emerged a regular butterfly with a perfect, toothy smile. She got a job in the kitchen at Camp Edwards and started dating Ian, a British guy who worked there. Everyone in East Troy listened to rock and roll because Alpine Valley, the outdoor music amphitheater, had opened when Sherri and Roberta were sophomores, and it transformed the town from a sleepy farming community into a place that was actually cool. Alpine was just down the road, drawing all the big acts to the area in the summer, from James Taylor to the Doobie Brothers. When the Grateful Dead played, the fans took over the whole town. They’d hang out in the square with their tie-dyed shirts and long braids, and use people’s hoses to shower in their yards. Most kids sold tickets to shows or worked as ushers, and come fall they’d return to school bragging about the famous musicians they’d met, showing off their autographed tickets and albums. Roberta had been the biggest rock-and-roll freak Sherri knew, especially for the Allman Brothers, but all that changed when Ian introduced her to British music that people in East Troy had never heard of, like Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Sex Pistols. She’d gone from being a first-class dork to one of the smokers that all the other girls were afraid to even walk past. She took up menthol cigarettes, sported a black leather bomber jacket that must have weighed as much as she did, and wrapped a Union Jack bandana around her wrist.

Roberta’s ascent to tough-girl popularity was hard for Sherri, who felt left behind. Sherri had always been pretty enough, but she was too socially awkward to get much attention for her looks, and her free time for the last three years had been spent taking care of her mother. Even though they both understood that Roberta couldn’t be seen with her anymore, Roberta watched out for her old friend, making sure nobody teased her or made her life too miserable. The kids stopped asking Sherri if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket to make her hair so wild and giving her a hard time for checking books out of the school library from the “Coping With” section with titles like Coping with Cliques and How to Be Your Own Best Friend.