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his father’s mildewed National Geographic s, it was always Rob who held forth with impromptu lectures on ritual scarring while Belinda stood off to one side with her shirt yanked up, doodling barred lines on her chest with lipstick. And back in that time before we knew what our bodies were, or how they worked, or had had them filled with the important fluids of adulthood, it was Belinda who turned somersaults naked on our lawn and showed us the deep, pleated mystery between her legs.
    I called her back the next day, at a number in California. I was oddly nervous while dialing, as if there was something at stake I wasn’t quite aware of.
    She answered the phone with that same surge of positive emphasis I remembered, that sonic boom of a “Hello!” traveling down the line.
    “Belinda, it’s Nicky.”
    “Well, hey, Nicky,” she said, her voice brightening with affection. “Thanks for calling me back.”
    “No thanks necessary,” I said. “I’ve been dying to talk to you in a hundred ways recently, B. In fact, I can’t believe I haven’t seen you.”
    “I had my reasons for staying away.”
    “Of course you did.”
    There was a pause.
    “So how are you, Belly?” I asked, slipping easily into her old nickname. At the age of sixteen, shyly, clumsily and finally lovingly, Belinda had become my “first.” By then she already owned the reputation in certain quarters for being a slutty girl who liked to touch boy’s unmentionables in the dark, but I always saw her in a different light, as someone radiantly hip, ennobled by membership in the utterly strange cool family across the street, and owning a far more detailed knowledge of Hermann Hesse than I’d ever have.
    “How I’m doing,” she said, “depends on who you talk to. My boyfriend thinks I’m in shock, my psychiatrist thinks I’m depressed, my roshi thinks it’s actually a milestone in my personal spiritual development, my employer thinks I’m faking it, and as for me, well, I have no fucking idea.”
    Very carefully and thoughtfully, I said, “Jeez, Belinda.”
    “I was sure,” she went on, “that I was okay, actually. Ididn’t want all the hoopla and crap of the memorial services in New York, so I did something very private, all alone here, burning some clothes on a mountaintop and chanting some griefy old poetry. I felt fine for a few weeks. Then suddenly, last week, I was going through this scrapbook that I’d found—”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Right, and kaboom, big time, actually. It was like the sky fell in. Lots of weeping and hysterical stuff. Gnashing teeth and throwing things. I felt like I’d taken some kind of timed-release poison pill and it wouldn’t stop working.”
    “That sounds reasonably awful,” I said, using one of our favorite old high school phrases.
    “Yeah, well, it was fucking terrible is what it was. In fact, still is. I’m calling you now because I’ve decided that I need to tie up loose ends. There’s a bunch of stuff I have parked in a long-term storage place in Monarch that I want to take back with me to California. His stuff, some of it. I’m coming in next week. Can we meet? I could use the moral support.”
    “Yes,” I said, before I even had a chance to think about it, “you bet.”
    “Great,” she said, “that’ll make me happy, Nick.”
    “Me too,” I said, grown suddenly happy myself. After college, as if trying to get it right, we’d come back together yet again, for one last time. It was during that period when I’d moved back to Monarch and, instead of applying to grad schools to study vertebrate paleontology as expected, had followed Rob’s lead and begun smoking too much pot, reading pop physics, and cultivating a newly detached superior persona. Belinda had meanwhile taken an expensivedegree at a Seven Sisters school and then warehoused her Tod’s and sundresses and returned home to her Monarch roots, singing in a local grunge band called the Cahoots, and raging against the machine