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guidance or visual landmarks they were forced to rely on calculations extrapolated from their last known position. As a result the Soyuz capsule reentered the atmosphere at a perilously steep angle, absorbed punishing G-forces, and lost a critical parachute during the descent.
    The capsule came down hard on a forested hillside in the Ruhr Valley. Vassily Golubev was killed on impact; Valentina Kirchoff suffered a traumatic head injury and was dead within hours. A dazed Colonel Glavin, with only a broken wrist and minor abrasions, managed to exit the spacecraft and was eventually discovered by a German search-and-rescue team and repatriated to Russian authorities.
    After repeated debriefings the Russians concluded that Glavin had lost his mind as a result of his ordeal. The colonel continued to insist that he and his crew had spent three weeks in orbit, but that was obviously madness…
    Because the Soyuz capsule, like every other recovered piece of man-made orbital gear, had fallen back to Earth the very night of the October Event.
     
     
    We ate lunch at the food court in the mall, where Diane spotted three girls she knew from Rice. These were older girls, to my eyes impossibly sophisticated, hair tinted blue or pink, wearing expensive bell-bottoms that rode low on their hips and tiny gold crosses on chains around their pale necks. Diane balled up her MexiTaco wrapper and defected to their table, where the four of them ducked their heads together and laughed. Suddenly my burrito and fries looked unappetizing.
    Jason evaluated the look on my face. “You know,” he said gently, “this is inevitable.”
    “What is?”
    “She doesn’t live in our world anymore. You, me, Diane, the Big House and the Little House, Saturday at the mall, Sunday at the movies. That worked when we were kids. But we’re not kids anymore.”
    Weren’t we? No, of course we weren’t; but had I really considered what that meant or might mean?
    “She’s been getting her period for a year now,” Jason added.
    I blanched. This was more than I needed to know. And yet: I was jealous that he had known it and I had not. She hadn’t told me about her period or her friends at Rice, either. All the confidences she had offered over the phone, I suddenly understood, had been kid confidences, stories about Jason and her parents and what she had hated at dinner. But here was evidence that she had hidden as much as she had shared; here was a Diane I had never met, blithely manifesting at a table across the aisle.
    “We should go home,” I told Jason.
    He gave me a pitying look. “If you want to.” He stood up.
    “Are you going to tell Diane we’re leaving?”
    “I think she’s busy, Tyler. I think she found something to do.”
    “But she has to come back with us.”
    “No she doesn’t.”
    I took offense. She wouldn’t just dump us. She was better than that. I stood and walked to Diane’s table. Diane and her three friends gave me their full attention. I looked straight at Diane, ignoring the others. “We’re going home,” I said.
    The three Rice girls laughed out loud. Diane just smiled embarrassedly and said, “Okay, Ty. That’s great. See you later.”
    “But—”
    But what? She wasn’t even looking at me anymore.
    As I walked away I heard one of her friends ask whether I was “another brother.” No, she said. Just a kid she knew.
     
     
    Jason, who had become annoyingly sympathetic, offered to trade bikes on the ride home. I didn’t really care about his bike at that point, but I thought a bike trade might be a way to disguise what I was feeling.
    So we worked our way back to the top of Bantam Hill Road, to the place where the pavement stretched like a black ribbon down into tree-shaded streets. Lunch felt like a cinder block embedded under my ribs. I hesitated at the end of the cul-de-sac, eyeballing the steep incline of the road.
    “Glide on down,” Jason said. “Go ahead. Get the feel of it.”
    Would speed distract me?