"As we get older, I find myself thinking more and more about how much she missed out on," says Angela. "What sort of man would she have married? What would she be telling us about her kids? Would she have worked? How would she look in her forties?"

The girls recall Sheila Walsh as vivacious, flirty, bubbly and busty. She had curly reddish-brown hair and got a kick out of experimenting with it; at one point she had this impossible-to-manage afro-like permanent. "Sheila was a little tiny thing, and just adorable," says Sally. "She had these big brown eyes. And her family, they were the 'Wow' family-five kids, each of them gorgeous."

The oldest child, Susan, was taller than Sheila, with long blond hair and blue eyes. She had an ethereal, graceful sort of beauty, in contrast to Sheila's attractiveness, so rooted in her perkiness. Their three younger brothers were strikingly handsome; everyone thought they belonged in clothing catalogues or in movies. In fact, years later, when Princess Diana's son Prince William hit his teen years, several of the Ames girls had the same thought: "He looks exactly like a Walsh boy." One of Sheila's brothers did end up becoming a model in adulthood.

Sheila's mom and dad were also extremely good-looking; everyone in town said so. Her mom, a former flight attendant, was a cla.s.sic beauty who dressed elegantly. Her dad, the dentist, was so handsome that the girls almost blushed when he entered the room. They looked forward to the days he'd come to cla.s.s and give oral-care presentations. He liked to hand out these red dissolving tablets, which would temporarily stain kids' teeth to show them where they needed to brush better. Sure, it was embarra.s.sing for the girls when every tooth turned reddish-pink. But Sheila's dad just didn't seem judgmental about it. And his oral-care plan seemed to work. The girls agreed that the Walsh kids had the whitest teeth in Iowa; word was that none of them had ever had a cavity.

Several of the girls had Dr. Walsh as their dentist, and photos of his smiling family were all over his office. Every year there was a new family photo to add to the collection. "You sat in his chair, just looking at Sheila everywhere," says Kelly.

Sheila's dad made a good living as a dentist, and so, like Marilyn, the doctor's daughter, she grew up a bit more privileged than some of the other Ames girls. The Walsh family belonged to a country club and had a finished bas.e.m.e.nt with a big sofa, a pinball machine and a foosball table. They spent summers at a s.p.a.cious house on Iowa's Lake Okoboji.

Dr. Walsh, who hadn't grown up with much, wanted his kids to work hard. And so he'd have all five of them at his office on Sat.u.r.day mornings, mowing and tidying the lawn out front. The other girls would drive by with their parents, and there was Sheila, pushing a lawn mower, while her kid brothers picked up stray sticks.

One day in the mid-seventies, Sheila told the girls that something exciting was happening at her house. Better Homes and Gardens Better Homes and Gardens magazine had arrived to take photos of the Walsh family's s.p.a.cious new addition, a mudroom/laundry room. Mrs. Walsh's decorator had let the magazine know about how creatively she had remodeled it. She'd taken bright green laminated dental cabinets from Dr. Walsh's office and installed them in the laundry room, a creative way to alleviate storage issues with five kids. There was a place for mittens, a place for boots. The decorator would even bring out-of-towners to come visit! magazine had arrived to take photos of the Walsh family's s.p.a.cious new addition, a mudroom/laundry room. Mrs. Walsh's decorator had let the magazine know about how creatively she had remodeled it. She'd taken bright green laminated dental cabinets from Dr. Walsh's office and installed them in the laundry room, a creative way to alleviate storage issues with five kids. There was a place for mittens, a place for boots. The decorator would even bring out-of-towners to come visit!

When the magazine came out, Sheila proudly waved it around and acted like a celebrity. She was so cute about it, who could be jealous? And who knew? Maybe the photos would start a national surge of dental furniture in laundry rooms.

The Ames girls found Mrs. Walsh to be more formal than most of the other mothers. There was a fancy white living room in the Walsh's house and no one was allowed to go in it. And Mrs. Walsh carried herself with a definite maturity. She wasn't the type to gossip with her daughter's friends or laugh it up with them. "Other girls' moms would come up and hug you, but Mrs. Walsh was always a little distant," Sally recalls.

Teenaged girls almost always have issues with their mothers, and Sheila and her mom had their share. Her dad, on the other hand, was more laid back, and in Sheila's mind, he was her champion. One Christmas, Jenny got her brother a puppy. She didn't want to give it to him until Christmas Day, so Sheila offered to keep the puppy at her house Christmas Eve. She asked her mother if that was OK, but her mom said no. Then her dad gave her a wink and said not to worry. He and Sheila conspired to hide the puppy somewhere in the house overnight, until Jenny came by in the morning.

In sixth grade, Sheila went to summer camp with Sally, and one night, the girls were sitting around talking about being homesick. Sheila kept saying how much she missed her father.

The girls got the sense that her mom got along better with Sheila's sister, Susan. It wasn't always easy for Sheila to live in the shadow of Susan, who was both glamorous and a quintessential good girl, always saying and doing the right things. Susan was calm, smart, popular-and Mrs. Walsh was close to her and proud of her.

"Then you had Sheila, who was more rebellious," says Jenny. The girls suspected that Sheila sometimes wondered if she disrupted the image of the perfect family. In their observations, Sheila didn't think she measured up to her family on a lot of fronts-in looks, in behavior, maybe in smarts.

Among the girls, she wasn't as centered and introspective as Marilyn was, or as book smart as Jane and Sally. But she had an ability to connect with people that the other girls found not just impressive but inspiring. Starting in grade school, several of the girls volunteered together at a local nursing home, pa.s.sing out cookies or reading aloud to residents with poor eyesight.

For most of the girls, the natural impulse was to gravitate toward the youngest, healthiest residents. Not Sheila. She'd head straight for the oldest and the sickest. She'd hold hands with the most wrinkled, the most senile, the most medicated old folks she could find. Oxygen tanks didn't scare her off. She'd just sit there, smiling and chatting.

"People had hoses up their noses, and it would freak some of us out," says Cathy. "But Sheila, she was so comfortable." It was like she connected right to people's hearts.

She'd been extremely close to her own grandmother, and in fact, she could get close to anyone's grandparent. Later, in high school, Sheila got a job in an a.s.sisted-living facility, pa.s.sing out and collecting food trays. Jenny's widowed grandfather lived there, and every day, even if Sheila wasn't on the schedule to service his room, she'd stop in to keep him company. "He thought she was adorable. He just loved her," says Jenny. "He'd always flirt with her, and she'd flirt with him right back."

Sheila started turning boys' heads at a very early age. When she was in first grade, Duffy Madden had a mad crush on her. His dad was one of Iowa State's football coaches. As Duffy remembers it: "Sheila's face just glowed when she smiled, and there was something in her eyes that made me stare at her all the time. I'd call her every night at dinnertime until her mother called mine and told me to knock it off."

For Christmas, Duffy stole a half-empty bottle of his mother's perfume, filled it to the top with water, and gave it to Sheila as a present. She wasn't so taken with the perfume or with him, so he tried a new tactic: feigning dislike for her. Once, at the end of the school day, he chased her out of the front door of St. Cecilia's-she was literally running away from him-and he slipped on ice at the entrance. He fell hard on his chin, as Sheila turned to giggle his way and then stepped into her mother's car. "I was more stunned and hurt by that than the six st.i.tches I got that day," says Duffy, who was just the first in a long line of boys smitten with Sheila.

In the summertime, when Sheila was up at Lake Okoboji with her family, her letters to the other girls back in Ames chronicled her life precisely-"I have 31 mosquito bites. It's so disgusting!"-and served as a travelogue of her interactions with boys. "I danced with these three creeps who just totally grossed me out!" she wrote to Sally in junior high. "But then I danced with Joe for three songs (slow!) and I was so happy! Now I like this other guy. His name is Ted Stoner and he is soooooo neat. I get b.u.t.terflies in my stomach. (He is definitely 2320123!)"

Even though young Ted Stoner's name made him seem like some bong-obsessed character in a seventies teen movie, Sheila's description of him resonated with the girls. After all, if he was definitely "two-three-two-oh-one-two-three," that meant Sheila considered him worthy of getting her phone number. In the Ames girls' numeric code, he added up to a dreamboat.

Sheila loved coming up with her own words. She went to horse-riding camp with Jenny the summer before ninth grade and wrote to Sally: "The guys here are really duddy, but nice." In other words, they were duds on the heart-palpitation scale, but she liked them. She called the s.e.xier boys "naabs" (nice a.s.s and body).

Sheila was a playful storyteller. In a long letter to Jenny when they were fifteen, she announced that she was in love with a boy named George. "I've slept with him," she wrote, hoping to get a gasp out of Jenny. "I mean, I slept with his picture under my pillow. Fooled ya, didn't I?"

Sheila wasn't afraid to take charge when it came to boys. She and Darwin Trickle were longtime friends, but in eleventh grade, they'd go out driving and talking, and both started to feel something more. One day they drove to Brookside Park in Ames, pulled into a s.p.a.ce and sat there talking. "I was very shy," Darwin recalls. "I didn't want to be aggressive. I always tried to be a gentleman. But all of a sudden, she says to me, 'Well, if you're not going to do it, then I will!' "

She leaned over and they shared their first kiss. And then she pulled back and just smiled at him, before leaning in for more.

Young girls today can forward a come-on email or instant message from a boy to all their girlfriends. In one click, everyone can judge his ability to woo with words, or they can weigh in on the photos of him attached to his email. But back when Sheila was young, she didn't even have access to a photocopy machine at her parents' lake house, so she'd mail Jenny the actual original notes she received from boys. "No one has turned me on as much as you," scribbled a boy named Tom. "I guess it's a combination of things did it. You're super looking. You've got an excellent body!!!! And the best part is your personality!" His two-page letter was littered with compliments, but Sheila never asked for it back from Jenny; for three decades, it has remained tied in a ribbon in Jenny's stack of "Sheila letters."

For a while, the love of Sheila's short life turned out to be a cla.s.smate named Greg Sims, who was a year younger than the Ames girls. He was, of course, extremely cute-a short, stocky guy with reddish-brown hair-and his dad ran the local car wash. When Greg showed interest in Sheila, starting late in high school, she'd just melt. For a while, she signed all her letters and notes "Sheila Sims." But she knew Greg was problematic. He was the kind of guy you couldn't always count on. He'd say he'd call and then he wouldn't. He'd say he'd stop at her house to take her to the movies, and then he didn't. "If Greg doesn't call within forty-five minutes, I'm giving up on him," she'd say. But she never really did. Once, they had a fight and he told her to get out of the car. She was barefoot, and it was a long walk home.

"Sheila was the best thing that ever happened to Greg, but he ignored her," recalls one of his friends, Steele Campbell. "She was going somewhere. She was great looking, she was fun, she had a head on her shoulders. We all thought: 'What's Greg thinking?' "

Sheila confided to Karla and Jenny: "I love him so much, but he's just so frustrating." Given her relationship with Kurt, Karla could empathize. But both she and Sheila soldiered on, smiling, and waiting for their guys to get it together.

In large measure because of the wilder boys they were hanging out with, the girls found themselves taking risks and making some bad decisions.

One night during high school, Sheila, Jenny and Angela were among those in a car drinking from a bottle of vodka. They saw the police coming, so Sheila opened the car door and threw the bottle out. Bad move. The cops arrested them for being underage and having an open bottle of liquor. Jenny's dad had to come down to the police station to get them.

The girls were pretty freaked out, but most of their parents were forgiving, and tried to use the arrest as a wake-up call and a learning experience. Sheila's mom was probably the angriest. For weeks, she wouldn't let Sheila have any contact with the other girls.

"She'd just ignore me because her mother forbade her to talk to me," says Jenny. "It was sad. I'd say, 'This is stupid. Why won't you talk to me?' She'd just say, 'I'm sorry, Jenny. My mom won't let me.' "

Sheila's father had a premonition that he'd never make it to old age. That's what Sheila told some of the girls. His own father had died young of a heart condition, and Mr. Walsh a.s.sumed the same fate awaited him.

Sheila's dad was an excellent athlete, especially at tennis, and he often played basketball with guys half his age. Still, he had a sense that his good health and athleticism wouldn't translate into longevity, and he was right. Eight months after Sheila graduated from high school, her dad was running up the basketball court and died of a heart attack. He was forty-seven.

The Ames girls saw how devastated Sheila was by his death. They noticed, too, how her mother, as a young widow, remained strong and kept the family on track. It seemed almost heroic to them. "I just remember how she held it together for those boys," says Sally. "You'd walk in the house, and she'd be helping all the boys with their homework. She became a very focused single mom."

Sheila ended up attending college at the University of Kansas and then Iowa State, and after her father died, she took a special interest in grief-related issues. Eventually, she designed a major that would train her to counsel families that had just learned that their kids were ill, often with terminal illnesses. In 1986, she got an internship doing that type of counseling at a hospital in Chicago.

At the time, she was hanging out with a gregarious man she knew from Iowa who worked for Budweiser. She called him "Bud Man"-most of the other Ames girls met him, but never knew his real name-and he was also in Chicago.

On a Sat.u.r.day night in March 1986, she and Bud Man were driving home from a bar and she had to go to the bathroom. At least that's the story the Ames girls recall hearing at the time. Sheila and Bud Man allegedly stopped at a friend's apartment building to use his bathroom, and he wasn't home. What happened next remains unclear, but somehow Sheila fell from that building. No one seems to know whether she was on a roof, a ledge, a balcony or a high porch. There were conflicting reports: She had jumped over a railing. Or she tried to jump between buildings, from one balcony to another. Or she tripped on wet leaves. Was she being pursued? Was she pushed? On a Sat.u.r.day night, lots of young people are drinking. Was that a factor?

She survived the fall and remained in a coma for two days. Then, for a brief moment she woke up, looked straight at a nurse and said, "Dad is coming to get me." She died soon afterward.

Mrs. Walsh donated Sheila's heart, lungs, kidney, corneas and liver to transplant patients. A Chicago TV station aired a story about how her organs had gone to seven different people, saving some of their lives. A tape of that piece was played at Sheila's house after her funeral, though the station got Sheila's last name wrong, calling her "Sheila Marsh."

Only half of the Ames girls, by then spread across the country, had enough money to fly back for Sheila's funeral. "I was in Ohio at graduate school," says Jane. "I had no car, no money. When Karen called me with the news, I felt completely paralyzed, but I couldn't think of how to get there. I remember someone saying, 'Gee, if we can't go to each other's funerals, what are we?' " (The five Ames girls who didn't make it to the memorial service have great regrets about it now. They say they had no closure. "Sometimes, I feel like Sheila never really died," says Angela.) At first, no one suspected anything sinister had happened to Sheila. Her family described her death as a terrible accident, and few details were offered. The Ames girls, just starting adulthood, accepted the bare-bones story they were told: Sheila had fallen and hit her head.

But a week after her death, Karen got a call from one of the boys she knew in high school. He asked her, "Did you hear what really happened to Sheila?" And then he told her what he had heard: Sheila had been found in an alley. Maybe she had been attacked. Karen was livid that he'd say such a thing. She hung up on him and somehow put what he said out of her mind. For a year after Sheila's death, she sometimes stood in the shower for a long time, crying. Thinking sweet Sheila had died in such an awful way was too much for her to contemplate. And yet when she thought back about that call, she had to wonder. The boy who told her the story was very religious. He wouldn't lie about something like that, nor would he joke about it. What was the truth?

Sheila's mother moved to Kansas City, and for the next eighteen years, the Ames girls never ran into her. But then in 2005, at the funeral for Cathy's mom, they saw a familiar woman. She looked older, naturally, but she was still a great beauty. They all recognized her. It was Mrs. Walsh.

When Sally thinks back to that encounter with Sheila's mom, one moment stands out for her. It was when she first saw Mrs. Walsh across the lobby of the church. "She ran over to me and hugged me," Sally says. "I'd known her my whole life, and she had always been nice and polite to me, but that was the most warmth I had ever felt from her."

Truth is, by hugging each other, they were really embracing a sweet young woman they both loved.

At lunch after the memorial service, the girls sat with Mrs. Walsh. She asked them how their lives had turned out, about their children and husbands. The girls made sure they spoke about their good memories of Sheila. And then Kelly, always willing to pose difficult questions that needed to be asked, said to Mrs. Walsh: "We never really got the story on how Sheila died. Can you tell us what happened?"

Mrs. Walsh seemed taken aback. "I don't know if I can bring myself to talk about it," she said. She told them that, yes, there were many unanswered questions after she lost Sheila. At the time, she was feeling such grief that it was too hard for her to look into all of them. And besides, she said, it wouldn't change anything. Sheila was gone.Sheila's obituary

5.Kelly

Kelly is proudly liberal and often disarmingly outspoken. That's been her role in the group since childhood, and here at the reunion nothing has changed.

"I have such respect for you, Kelly," Marilyn tells her at one point, "for your heart, for your ability to write, for all your knowledge and how smart you are. But there are things you do in your life . . ."

Kelly is smiling, waiting . . .

". . . that I would never do in my life," Marilyn finishes. That's absolutely OK by Kelly. Marilyn then adds, "But I don't judge you."

Well, in truth, the girls do judge Kelly. And they do talk about her to each other. And they do worry about her. But most of all, as Karla explains it, they do love her.

Kelly has offered some details to the girls about not being completely faithful in her marriage, and about spending almost $30,000 on her divorce, much of it for a custody study and discussions concerning parenting arrangements. Since her divorce after twenty years of marriage, Kelly has had a social life that some of the other girls consider more active than they'd engage in. "Kelly doesn't need everybody's approval," says Marilyn, who calls her, delicately, "the strongest personality" in the group.

As long as everyone can remember, Kelly has tended to be purposely argumentative and predictably unpredictable. "She goes for the shock value. She always has. And she just spills," says Diana, her closest friend, both as a kid and now. As Cathy sees it: "A lot of times, I think Kelly just likes the debate, whether she's pa.s.sionate about the subject or not." Since their teen years, Cathy has advised her to consider the ways she comes off, including to men. "When a guy walks in a room, he can tell the girl who's totally going to sleep with him," Cathy tells her. "You don't want to have that energy about you."

As always, Kelly listens, smiles, and does her own thing. She thinks it can be valuable to experiment in life. (She was the only Ames girl to have her eyebrow pierced; she did it in her early thirties and has since let it close up.) She is proudly sensuous, incorrigibly flirtatious and, at the same time, a thoughtful feminist. She'll speak without a filter and ask any question that she thinks deserves an answer.

For twenty years, she has taught high-school journalism in the small town of Faribault, Minnesota, two hours north of the Iowa border and an hour south of Minneapolis. Students usually go one of two ways when it comes to her. Either they consider her the most refreshing and inspirational teacher they've ever had, or they don't know what to make of her. She encourages her young journalists to tangle with administrators over free-speech and First Amendment issues, and she leads the charge with sometimes bruising results. At times, she has barely been on speaking terms with the school princ.i.p.al, which is why she requests that a union rep be present when she and the princ.i.p.al have to interact. She has a fearless att.i.tude, and luckily, she also has tenure.

Kelly has always had the ability to give the Ames girls an amusing jolt, and the jolt discussed at this year's reunion is "Kelly's swinging email." The email was actually a response to an email that Jenny sent out to all the girls. Jenny had attached photos of her young son. Kelly typed back that Jenny's son was a beautiful boy, and then she got chatty. She told the girls that she recently had been to a night-club with a female friend, and they ran into a few swingers. Naturally, Kelly began asking a lot of questions about how these married couples handle their swinging s.e.x lives. The email began: "I had my first experience with swingers, a husband and his wife. And I think she's better looking than he is!" (Kelly later told the girls she didn't actually take the couple up on their offer; she was joking about the "experience.") In any case, she clicked "reply all" on the email, just like always, and her story headed out to the other nine Ames girls. What she didn't realize, however, was that Jenny had sent those photos in a ma.s.s email. It had gone out not just to the Ames girls, but to other friends and relatives, including Jenny's parents and in-laws. So did Kelly's swinging response.

Kelly is not easily mortified, but she was a bit embarra.s.sed. A few months later, she ran into Jenny's mother. "She was completely gracious," Kelly says. Jenny's mom told her, "I'm glad you had a good time that night."

In truth, Kelly was mostly just intrigued by the swingers culture. Whenever she went out to nightclubs with friends, she found herself meeting more and more swingers. She even considered writing an article about the prevalence of swingers for a Twin Cities alternative magazine, but because of her divorce proceedings, she feared that writing a story might hurt her custody situation. However, she did trade a few friendly emails with that original husband-and-wife team that had approached her. "I wondered," she later said, "if it wouldn't be better to 'date' a couple rather than try to find a good man." She reflects on her feelings: She was hurting from the divorce and not able to imagine herself ever married again. "I was looking for kindness and stability. Maybe it would be nice to be with a kind, stable woman." But as she wrote in an email to the other Ames girls, when the female half of that swinging couple flashed her large b.r.e.a.s.t.s at Kelly in the ladies' room, Kelly was reminded of what she already knew. "She held out these gigantic things from this tattered lavender bra," Kelly recalls, "and I said to myself, 'I am so way, way straight!' I looked at those things and I knew that this was not for me. A part of me was feeling like I don't want to discriminate between men and women. But after that experience, no . . ."

Of course, the swingers email that went to Jenny's loved ones was an "oops" that got away. But Kelly also writes some of the most thoughtful and literary correspondence in the group.

Email has been a great gift to the Ames girls' friendship, as it has to so many other women's friendships in recent years. As a teacher of written expression, Kelly has talked to her students about how communications between the girls have evolved. When they were kids in Ames, they pa.s.sed notes in cla.s.s or wrote each other long letters from summer vacation. In their twenties, they'd trade letters and phone calls, but because they were getting so busy raising their families in different parts of the country, their interactions sometimes tapered off dramatically. Then, starting in their mid-thirties, email became their foremost bonding tool. Suddenly, they could write to all the other Ames girls immediately, simultaneously and daily. Long notes, dashed-off comments, quick questions-"reply all" became their favorite computer command. How wonderful it was that they no longer had to lick stamps, stuff ten envelopes and drive to the post office. (When they first took to the Internet, some of them shared email addresses with their husbands. But, not surprisingly, they soon saw the value in having their own private addresses.) With reply-all emails, Kelly says, "each of us can choose to be an active partic.i.p.ant in a conversation or to simply read without commenting. The important thing is that we are all part of the conversation when the group emails go out."

At the reunion, Kelly laughs about their early forays into email, back in the mid-1990s. Marilyn, proving herself the consummate stay-at-home mother, at first told the other girls that reply-all emails would be good for sharing "innovative dinner recipes." Kelly rolled her eyes at the suggestion, as did some of the others. Kelly joked that the only food-related emails she'd be sending out would be about the drive-through restaurants she sometimes resorted to feeding her kids at.

In practice, it turned out, Kelly's emails to everyone else often became impa.s.sioned essays about the uncertainties of womanhood and motherhood. One email she sent out just before this reunion was about teaching her fifteen-year-old son to drive. He's the first of the Ames girls' kids to get a driver's permit, and she began her tale by reaching back to the moment she fell in love with him. "Quin was born almost six weeks early," she wrote, "and I held off loving him because I was afraid of losing him. It was not until two weeks later when he was home, in good health, that I felt the immensity of the miracle of my baby. I was on the couch holding him while he slept, and I wept as a vision of his life flashed before me, and I felt all the joy that had yet to be shared between us."

From that sweet memory, she moved on to her current experiences of letting him take the wheel of her car, while she sits in the pa.s.senger seat "frantically screaming, flailing my arms, warning him of danger, danger, like the robot in Lost in s.p.a.ce Lost in s.p.a.ce. 'LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! STOP, DAMMIT!!' " She described her son as c.o.c.ky and oblivious-"someday destined to explode mightily through my garage door as a result of forgetting to open it, so confident is he in his driving skills that he need not look back." She explained that she had come to realize that his death-defying driving lessons were part of a continuum. "He was reckless as a toddler, too, and we put a big padded winter hat on him until he was steady on his feet." She explained to the other girls that she struggled to strike a balance. "I do not want to be an uptight mom who wears holes in the floor mat, always needing to put brakes on her child."

Her email ended with a recollection of the time she taught her son to ride a bike when he was four years old. She took off his training wheels, and he got his bearings quickly. Begging her to let go, he sped down the driveway, pedaling away. "There were about two seconds of ecstatic joy on both our parts as he took off and maintained his balance," Kelly wrote. "But as the bike moved faster and faster, we both suddenly understood he couldn't stop." She had forgotten to tell him how to use the brakes. He crashed into the nearby woods and hit his head on a tree, which left him "knocked out like a bird thunking into a window," Kelly wrote. "I said 'I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!'-every mother's mantra-as I ran into the woods to retrieve him."

Reading her email in their homes across the country, the other girls couldn't help but think about their own children and the safety lessons ahead. But they also thought of Kelly's loving relationship with her kids, and how that had been damaged by her divorce. In that email, she had written about cradling her injured son when he was young: "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" But the girls knew that her words went beyond the bike-riding lesson-right into the present.

Kelly's great-grandmother, who lived until Kelly was in junior high, found her way to the northwest part of Iowa in the 1890s. Like many who settled there, she and her family were of Dutch heritage. Most of the new residents belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, which had stringent rules forbidding things like dancing and drinking.

Kelly's parents, Larry and Lynn, married and had Kelly when they were in their teens. In 1963, they moved to Ames so Larry could complete an undergraduate degree and a master's degree in guidance and counseling at Iowa State. They lived in former World War II military barracks that had been turned into housing for married students. That's where Kelly, not yet a year old, got her first look at Ames.

Kelly and Diana, then and now In seventh grade, while hanging out with her friends, Kelly did the math and discovered that her mom had just turned eighteen when she had her. Over the years, the other Ames girls found it somewhat exotic that Kelly had been born to such young parents. It was almost as if it fit with Kelly's nontraditional persona. Here they were, in seventh grade, and while Karla, Cathy and Diana had mothers who were forty-seven, forty-eight and fifty years old, Kelly's mom hadn't turned thirty yet.

Even though they were so young, Kelly's mom and dad were considered to be among the strictest of all the girls' parents. (Sheila's parents were also young and thought to be strict.) Kelly was often getting punished for missing curfews, and she'd respond by coming up with effective plans to stay out late or not divulge exactly where was going and what she was doing.

The other girls loved Kelly's dad as the school guidance counselor and friendly homeroom teacher, but they couldn't figure out why he was so hard on Kelly. Looking back, her dad now realizes that Kelly was mature beyond her years in certain ways, and she was also the type of teen who had little patience for rules. Maybe, he says, he could have given her a bit more room.

Kelly recalls that it was Diana who introduced her to hot curlers. "We were all influenced by Farrah Fawcett," Kelly says, "so I purchased my own set of curlers. Then one day my dad and I fought and he took away my hot curlers to punish me. I threatened to run away from home if he didn't give them back. I didn't want to be without those curlers! My anger was beyond reason, and because my parents were on their way out for the night, they decided to give me my curlers back so I wouldn't do something terribly dramatic or embarra.s.sing while they were gone."

Knowing Kelly as long and as well as she does, Diana can now reach back into their childhoods to psychoa.n.a.lyze things. Kelly was a firstborn; she has one younger brother. "I was a lastborn, so I had more freedom," Diana says. "Kelly's life was the complete opposite. She was always getting grounded, always getting into trouble."

Diana's mom was a busy working mother, a dietician, so Diana says she had more opportunities after school "to test the waters." Her parents trusted her, and she was generally a good kid. Plus, her mother and father were more lenient, probably because she was the last of four children. As a result, she feels she got her fill of wildness when she was younger. The way Diana sees it, Kelly as an adult still has things to get out of her system-including figuring out her romantic life now that her marriage has ended.

As she headed into her teens, Kelly was certainly attractive and confident, with a nice figure and an easy way of interacting with boys. So she got plenty of attention. But because Diana was her best friend, Kelly often felt like the less noticed sidekick.

There were many moments when it was hard for her to be around Diana. Known as "the knockout" of the Ames girls, voted "best body" in a school poll, a member of the Homecoming court, Diana was literally a girl who could stop traffic. As Karla tells it: "People turned heads to see her."

One day, Diana was walking down a street near Iowa State, and college boys in a pa.s.sing car noticed her. They began hooting and hollering, calling to her out the window. Then boom! The boy at the wheel slammed his car into the car in front of him. Karla witnessed the whole thing and wasn't surprised. As she saw it, it was an accident waiting to happen. "Diana was just so pretty," she says.

Kelly found herself attracted to the high-school jocks and the occasional naughty guy, while Diana tended to like guys who were thin with rock-star hair-guys who were younger versions of Rod Stewart. So it helped that Diana and Kelly found themselves attracted to different types of boys. A part of Kelly also felt lucky to be hanging out with Diana, because the cute guys would want to be around them.

Like the other girls, Kelly also appreciated that Diana rarely seemed conceited and didn't flaunt her looks. Diana had a sweetness about her that, most of the time, allowed them to be OK about her attractiveness.

Still, Kelly felt a near-constant compet.i.tiveness with Diana from the earliest days of their friendship. She'd avoid school activities if Diana was involved in them. Though Kelly had studied dance for ten years, when Diana signed up for the jazz dance cla.s.s in high school, Kelly dropped out of it. "I just didn't want to compete with her," she says now.

They were partners in physics cla.s.s until Kelly started failing and opted to drop the cla.s.s. Looking back, she now believes she failed on purpose, because she didn't want to measure herself against Diana.

Kelly never went to the senior prom because the guy she liked ended up asking Diana. Kelly didn't stop Diana from going with him; she smiled through it. But it was not an easy experience for her.

After college, Kelly and Diana spent six weeks backpacking together through Europe. Kelly, always adventurous, decided to emulate the Europeans and sunbathe topless. Diana declined. Kelly could be impulsive, a risk-taker, opening up to strangers on trains, asking them questions. Diana was often more sensible and careful. They both grew up on that trip, and some experiences left them uncomfortable. At one youth hostel, they tried to get to sleep while a couple in a bed across the room appeared to be having s.e.x. On another day, because of a transit strike, they decided to hitchhike to where they were going. They were quickly picked up by creepy men in their thirties and were relieved that they were actually driven to their destination and allowed out of the car.

At times, the trip tested and strained their friendship. Diana was the quintessential American blond beauty, and the men of Europe definitely noticed. "Everywhere we go, your blond hair is like a magnet," Kelly told her. Diana shrugged. What did Kelly want her to do about it? In one cafe, a man tried to woo Diana, and Kelly listened to his patter and thought to herself, "This guy's just icky. I've had enough." She went off and sat alone at a table sipping her drink as she watched the guy fawn over her friend.

Despite their differences, Diana says "it's really a love-hate relationship between us, but much more love than hate. My closest sibling is eight years older than I am. Kelly was and is like a sister to me; we love each other and bicker like biological sisters. I have shared more things with her than anyone else. And we always laugh."

"Diana is good for Kelly and always has been," Kelly's mom says. "People with two different personalities work well together. It's like in a marriage. Opposites attract."

Of course, at the same time, Kelly and Diana feel twinned in more ways than they can count. For instance, in driver's education cla.s.s the summer before they turned sixteen, Diana and Kelly were a.s.signed the same instructor and the same car. So they had their first driver's seat views of Ames from behind the same steering wheel. "To this day," Kelly says, "I can't parallel park without thinking of Diana hanging out the window, telling me how close I am to the curb."

All her life, Kelly has liked finding causes to rally behind. With the other girls supporting her, she ran for student-council president at Central Junior High. Her campaign platform included a promise of regular "Flip-Flop Days" and "better salad dressings in the lunchroom." She delivered on both. When she was coeditor of the newspaper at Ames High, her contrarian impulses and casual rebelliousness took many forms. She wrote editorials haranguing students for not reading the paper: "One would think that Ames High contains a vast number of illiterates!" Another editorial op-ed piece she wrote celebrated school pranks as "constructive in boosting student morale."

Angela was her coeditor in chief, and for one story, they featured retirees at the local nursing home where Sheila worked. Many of them were born in the 1880s and 1890s, and they were asked to think back to their teen years and describe what they thought the future held for them. The old people spoke of how optimistic and appreciative they were: "I never thought there would be radios, television, airplanes flying all over the world." "I thought the world was a wonderful place." "During the Depression, you worked and even if you didn't have much, you enjoyed what you had. We looked ahead to a better future."

Then, the newspaper asked graduating Ames High students: "What do you think the future holds for you?" Out of twenty-seven responses, twenty-three were bleak: "The world will destroy itself." "I don't think the future looks good at all. Technology is taking over." "Everyone is going to get more and more bitter toward each other until utter chaos will break out." "I think it is going to be disastrous and I am glad I only have one life to go through it." "My guess is there will be another World War before 1990." Of all the students interviewed, Cathy was just about the only optimist, and even she was vague. "The future will be exciting," she said. "You won't know what to expect."

As coeditor, Kelly liked the idea of using the school paper to question everything, to rile people up, to print stories calling Ames "a plastic oasis in the middle of a huge cornfield called Iowa."

She had the same authority-questioning impulses in the cla.s.sroom. Several of the girls were in English cla.s.s together, and they were asked to select a famous hero and write an essay about him or her. A few of the girls picked presidents. Those who wanted to choose a female settled on the usual suspects, women such as Helen Keller or Amelia Earhart. But Kelly decided she didn't want to write about a man, and she didn't want to write about a dead woman. She wanted a true living heroine, and no one came to mind. So she decided to write an essay about the sad fact that she had no female heroes at all. Her teacher wasn't pleased.

The other girls figured she was Kelly being Kelly. As Cathy always told her: "You just like to be different. You just like confrontation." Everyone else could find a hero, male or female. Why couldn't Kelly? (Her theme song could have been "Iowa Stubborn" from The Music Man The Music Man-which, coincidentally, mentions Ames in its lyrics.) In Kelly's mind, she wasn't just being difficult. She would have liked to write about a sports hero, but most of the female athletes celebrated back in the 1970s were gymnasts or skaters, and they were girly in ways Kelly couldn't relate to. She saw no clear heroines on TV, either. Like other young women of their era, the Ames girls would speculate about who they'd be on Gilligan's Island, Gilligan's Island, Ginger or Mary Ann-very s.e.xy or very cute. Though Diana was more demure, she had the looks of a perfect Ginger, of course. And Sheila was pure Mary Ann. The rest of them? "I guess we're all Mary Anns," Kelly decided. Those were the women and the choices girls were seeing on TV. There was no one suggesting any of them could play the Professor on Ginger or Mary Ann-very s.e.xy or very cute. Though Diana was more demure, she had the looks of a perfect Ginger, of course. And Sheila was pure Mary Ann. The rest of them? "I guess we're all Mary Anns," Kelly decided. Those were the women and the choices girls were seeing on TV. There was no one suggesting any of them could play the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Gilligan's Island, and it didn't occur to them either. and it didn't occur to them either.

Kelly wished the other girls would understand why she longed for more heroines-or more heroes who weren't just old white presidents. She wondered why there weren't more female authors or African-American scientists to learn about. Her teacher didn't understand her complaints. She took the criticism in Kelly's essay personally and gave her barely a pa.s.sing grade on it.