“I got my medical card,” Lisa says suddenly.

Beth and I look at her.

“Beats buying a baggie of skunk off Todd Villanueva behind the bleachers at halftime,” Lisa says.

Beth laughs. “If by buy you mean blow.”

Lisa waves a hand but doesn’t deny it. Her eyes gleam, but not with tears this time. She gives a pointed look around the room. “I wonder if he’s here tonight?”

“I saw him when I came in. Married, four kids, owns a car dealership in Columbus.” Beth leans a little, closing our triangle. “Christian Campbell’s here, too.”

Lisa fans her face. “Ooh, la la. That would be Dr. Campbell to you.”

“C.C.’s a doctor?” I shouldn’t be surprised. He’d always talked about becoming a surgeon. How he’d have his own practice, a fleet of sports cars, a big house, and a bigger bank account.

“That’s the rumor. A surgeon, no less. Plastic, maybe? Think he’d give me a friends and family discount?” Lisa asks with a laugh as she spins halfway around to seek out the sight of him. “God, he’s hot, isn’t he?”

“Hotter than he was in high school, even,” Beth says and fixes me with another knowing look. “Didn’t you and him have a thing?”

I pull a surprised expression. “Not really. We were lab partners our junior year. That’s about it. We didn’t really hang in the same crowd.”

But sometimes, we got high and fooled around in my parents’ carriage house. Sometimes he’d come over after school when my brother was at football practice and my parents were at work. Sometimes, he would call me late at night and whisper to me through the phone, as though even then, he didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing.

The rest of the time, in public, in front of his friends and anyone else, he’d pretend he didn’t know me.

“Anyway,” I add, “he was dating Jen Tillis.”

We all fall silent at that. Jen Tillis was the first of our class to die. Suicide, freshman year of college. Without social media to spread the news, it had filtered to everyone via word of mouth, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard the whole story. I saw her parents now and then around town. Her mother hadn’t aged well.

Beth turns to me. Her smile is bright and wide, showing a span of gleaming white teeth that stand out against the dark plum of her lipstick. Like me, she’s in black, and like me, she’s a blonde. We match without looking anything alike.

“So,” she says over the rim of her glass, her eyes locking with mine. “When did you go blonde?”

“It’s my natural color.”

Beth’s artificially shaped eyebrows go up, up, up. “You bitch. A natural platinum blonde and those fucking Louboutins? Jay kay. You look great. I hate you. Kidding, I’m kidding.”

She’s not kidding.

The arrival of several of their high school cheerleading squad friends is heralded by squeals. They all bounce up and down and hug each other, while their husbands sip whiskeys from squat glasses and stand at an appropriate distance without speaking much to each other. A few of the husbands are sizing me up. They don’t know that in high school I wasn’t one of the popular girls, like their wives. They only see me the way I am now, and I’m not ashamed to be proud of how I look in comparison to those high school beauty queens who’ve aged and broadened and started going gray. None of it’s for them, though. This dress, the shoes, the hair, the jewelry, the lipstick … it’s all for Christian. Except, when I turn casually to look for him across the room, he’s no longer there.