“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t—”

“Hey.” She put a hand on my arm. “It’s okay. Seriously! We were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing—if we did, I’d have been more particular about who I kissed. I can’t tell you how awkward it is to run into all those boys in town now. The paunches on some of them, my gawd.”

I laughed, and she joined in, our voices trilling in unison. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was truly happy to be home.

“Listen, my next class isn’t until three. Have you had lunch? I could eat a Clydesdale.”

Before I knew it, Suze’s arm was hooked through mine and we were girls again, the best of friends.

* * *

There weren’t many places to eat in Swanton, and Suze didn’t want to waste precious catch-up time driving into St. Albans, so we settled on the pizza place five blocks east. Music was playing, a nineties indie anthem I’d liked as a kid, back when my life was simple, and the menu was a mixed bag of limp iceberg salads and deep-fried everything else. I ordered two slices of Hawaiian, Suze got a veggie calzone as big as a loaf of bread, and as we dug into our lunch, we dove into the past.

It was immediately clear to me that my friend’s memories and my own didn’t always converge. In fact, my recollection of events was often woefully skewed. Parties I remembered as ragers Suze recalled as totally lame. When she talked about Ben Bradley and Cody Brown, boys from our class we apparently thought were smoking hot, it was like I was hearing their names for the first time.

In some cases, my impression of our history appeared to be just plain wrong. I was sure Suze and I had almost gotten arrested for underage drinking in the park near the plaza that now housed her studio. My cousin Abe was there, too, that night, and thanks to his quick thinking he’d pulled us into the bushes moments before a police car drove by. Suze didn’t perceive things this way at all. In her version of events, it wasn’t a cop who showed up but one of her neighbors, the dad of a kid in our class. According to Suze, he feigned regret that we hadn’t saved a bottle for him, and told us half-heartedly not to get into too much trouble.

Memory, I realized as we spoke, is a tenuous thing—the truth a filament thin as a spider’s web—but I didn’t like how much I’d forgotten. As she crunched her crust, Suze tried to put my mind at ease.

“I happen to specialize in storing useless information about ancient social events,” she said. “We had a lot going on back then, and you had to make room in that brain of yours for more important things. None of that stuff is important anyway. It makes me tired just thinking about it—although that could just be the hormones.” She patted her stomach. “I’m dancing for two.”