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rich girls at her school. She’d never minded living on the fringe of Bellwin social life. Fringe was fine with her. She had her fringe friends, Val Rivera and Paula Castleman. Though since Paula’s mother married an Italian shoe magnate the year before, Paula appeared to be drifting away from the fringe to the white-hot center of Bellwin life.
    Paula and Carly bonded on the first day of kindergarten, after circle-time sharing revealed them to be the only two girls in the class who had spent their entire summers in the city. No camp, no Europe, no house in “the country,” wherever that was. This was back when Paula’s mother managed a Madison Avenue shoe boutique and Isabelle was an assistant to the then-head of college placement. It wasn’t that the five-year-olds who had summer homes and servants rejected the ones who didn’t. Or that the ones who didn’t—Carly and Paula—felt inferior to the ones who did. At five, Carly was more impressed by Paula’s weekly trips to Coney Island than she was by Piper Peterson’s week on a yacht docked in Monaco. They simply felt more comfortable with each other.
    Val came to Bellwin in seventh grade, when the school was undergoing a big diversity push. Val would have gotten into Bellwin anyway. She was that smart and that disciplined. But she’d have been perfectly happy to stay at St. Cecilia’s, her neighborhood Catholic school, if Bellwin hadn’t found her and offered her a full scholarship.
    Despite the common wisdom about three being a crowd, the three of them had managed to stay a three-some of best friends up through the end of sophomore year. She and Val were still friendly with Paula, but now they were mostly a twosome.
    So how does a well-behaved, reasonably confident, responsible, and otherwise normal teenage girl become the kind of person who spends an entire day following her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend around the streets of Manhattan—ducking into doorways, knocking into people, and almost getting run over by taxis along the way?
     
    It started with a string of bad luck at the end of Carly’s junior year. Or what seemed like bad luck at the time. Later, at the starry-eyed height of her relationship with Brian, Carly would see the series of events that had disrupted her life as the handiwork of a celestial being, someone whose job was to bring together lovers who were destined to meet. Maybe even Aphrodite herself, the patron goddess of the ancient city Carly was supposed to spend her summer helping to unearth.
    There’s a picture of four-year-old Carly hanging on the wall of her father’s office at Denman College. She’s wearing a big floppy hat and sunglasses and peering into a shallow hole she is proud of having dug all by herself.
    At first glance you might take it for a typical vacation shot. But if you stopped to study it, wondering if you knew the beach where it was taken, you’d see that the ground you took at first to be sand was reddish, densely packed dirt. You’d look in vain for a brightly colored plastic bucket by Carly’s side or a glimpse of shimmering ocean behind her.
    Thirteen years later, Carly could still recall the moment that picture was taken. After digging for what felt like hours but was mere minutes, she’d uncovered a trove of archaeological treasure: a clay shard, three well-worn coins, and a small metal thing she would later learn was called a fibula, a decorative pin that was to the ancient world what buttons, zippers, and Velcro are to ours.
    Her father told her the shard was part of a jar or cup and at least two thousand years old. “Imagine a little girl like you, holding this in her hand,” he’d said, as he placed it in hers, “drinking juice at breakfast.” Carly had pictured a dark-haired girl with golden-brown skin dressed in a mini toga and sandals. She wondered whether she and the girl would like each other and what kinds of games they would play together. Up until the moment she held those things in