In 2001, the Ames Blue Star program closed down, in part due to liability issues: What if a Blue Star volunteer turned out to be a pedophile? And how could residents reconcile their advice to kids-"Stay away from strangers"-with telling them to go to a stranger's door if there was a blue star in the window?

The Blue Star program was a sweet idea in theory. But it was doomed by the currents of a changing culture.

Iowa has 2.9 million residents, and each year, the state produces about 2.1 billion bushels of corn. That translates to 41,048 pounds of corn harvested for each man, woman, and child in the state. The overwhelming presence and importance of corn in Iowa can not be overstated.

Though none of the Ames girls came from farm families, cornfields played a key role in their lives. In those fields, they learned about love and s.e.x, about the hardest kind of work-and about death, too.

Marilyn's older brother, of course, died at that intersection of four cornfields. That car accident occurred because the corn in September 1960 had grown to nine feet tall, obstructing the view. So Marilyn knew how a cornfield could quietly become a killer.

Karla, Cathy, Sally, Jane, Karen, Kelly and Diana became overly familiar with cornfields starting at about age thirteen, when they got their first summer jobs deta.s.seling corn. Crew members were supposed to be fourteen, but some of the girls lied about their ages and were hired.

Iowa is the top state for corn production because there's usually plenty of rain, the soil is deep and rich, and farmers have grown adept at raising livestock whose waste offers nutrients that best fertilize cornfields. More than half a century ago, corn was said to be "knee-high by the Fourth of July." But by the time the girls got their jobs, modern hybrid corn seed and better weed control meant the corn was shoulder-high in early July. And by August, when deta.s.seling was under way, the corn was already at its maximum height of up to twelve feet tall.

For Iowa kids, deta.s.seling is a character-building rite of pa.s.sage. The job of a deta.s.seler is to prevent corn from pollinating itself. Kids are hired by the thousands each summer to walk through the fields removing the ta.s.sel, which is the pollen-producing top of the corn plant. This allows pollen from a different variety of corn, grown elsewhere in the field, to blow over and pollinate the deta.s.seled corn. The resulting crop is healthier, with higher yields and better-tasting sweet corn.

In theory, deta.s.seling is a romantic notion. Pollen dust would blow across hundreds of acres, with the corn plants attempting their own form of s.e.xual activity. The rows of stalks without ta.s.sels were referred to as the "female" rows and the ones with ta.s.sels were the "males."

As the girls quickly learned, however, there was little romance in the work. It was mind-numbing, repet.i.tive and wearying. They'd have to wake up at 5 A.M., before the fields got too hot, and they'd get picked up by an old school bus chartered by seed corn companies. They'd spend the next eight hours walking through half-mile-long rows of corn, yanking off ta.s.sels. By the end of each day, they had deta.s.seled thousands of plants and walked almost ten miles.

In the morning it was often chilly, and they had to contend with dew that soaked their clothes and mud that climbed up their ankles. By afternoon, they felt like fainting from the heat and insect bites, and they were itchy from brushing against the leaves. They tried to guard against corn rash by wearing bandanas and long-sleeved shirts and pants, but it always got too hot later in the day, so they'd take off layers of clothing. The girls liked getting a tan, but the resulting corn rash felt like a bad sunburn covering their entire bodies. There were rumors that deta.s.selers could also end up getting "corn fever" from the heat and repet.i.tive exertion, rendering them insane. That was apocryphal, or at least they never came upon such a victim.

"The working conditions suck!" Diana wrote in a note to Kelly one night after deta.s.seling. "It's so wet, you'd die! There are ponds knee-deep in the middle of the fields! I feel like we're in rice paddies during the Vietnam War-trudge, trudge, trudge. Half my crew goes barefoot, but I did it for one round yesterday and cut the h.e.l.l out of my feet."

Despite the conditions, the girls did have their share of laughs. For a while, some of them had that buxom crew chief in her early twenties who was a celebrated wet T-shirt contest winner. The girls got a kick out of how the boys on the crew enjoyed watching the chief sweat through the day.

The girls had fun rating the cutest boys in the field, but too much of the time, deta.s.seling was an isolating job. Because each girl had her own row and the corn was so high between them, they couldn't really see each other or talk to each other. They'd come upon each other only when they got to the end of a row. Yes, the boys were there, too, but the girls were often too dead-tired and dirty to interact much with them. (Later, when Sally met her husband, they had in common the childhood experience of deta.s.seling. He had some good stories, too. Once, he was too slow finishing up his last row of the day and the bus left without him. In those days before cell phones, there was no way to call his mom, and there are no phone booths in cornfields. So he started walking back toward civilization and, eventually, miles up the road, someone he knew happened to drive by and pick him up.) One day well after she arrived in Los Angeles as a makeup artist, Cathy was working with model Cindy Crawford and they got to talking. They realized they were from neighboring states, Iowa and Illinois. Turned out that Cindy, who grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, had been a deta.s.seler at age sixteen. A photographer from the local paper took her photo working in a cornfield, and modeling scouts saw it. She never had to deta.s.sel again. By the next summer, she was a model.

Cathy couldn't help but tell Cindy about her own deta.s.seling experiences with the Ames girls. "She and I had this whole deta.s.seling moment," she says. "We bonded over that." And, of course, she later told the Ames girls about her interaction. After all, women who deta.s.seled as girls feel they're part of the same battle-weary sorority, and it was fun to realize Cindy Crawford was a member.

Sally, the only one of the girls living in Iowa today-she lives in Spirit Lake, 180 miles northwest of Ames-pa.s.ses by cornfields all the time. Sometimes, she thinks of the other girls and those long days deta.s.seling. "Out in those cornfields," says Sally, "that's where we learned there was honor in a hard day's work."

Work wasn't all that they learned in the cornfields, of course. For the girls today, a stalk of corn also can bring back memories of flirting or making out or crying over a boy too drunk to notice them. All through high school, even in the winter, they went to giant keggers deep in the cornfields surrounding Ames. One of their friends, Jeff Mann, was the son of a teacher, so he had an old mimeograph machine in his bas.e.m.e.nt. He'd run off maps and pa.s.s them out to hundreds of kids, pinpointing the exact spot in the specific cornfield where the beer was (and the cops weren't).

Before Iowa's drinking age went from age eighteen to age nineteen in 1978, party organizers were even allowed to give the location of cornfield keggers on the Ames High morning announcements, since many of the seniors could drink legally. (The drinking age was raised further, to twenty-one, in 1986, but underage drinking never let up. Like other college towns, Ames had to contend with high-school kids who grew up fast, modeling the university students.) Sometimes, on kegger nights, the girls would get horribly lost driving around in the dark on gravel roads, corn all around, and then suddenly, they'd see fifty taillights off in the distance, a glowing beacon signifying "The party is this way!" When they pulled up, Jeff Mann or other organizers would be there, charging everyone $5 for an all-you-can-drink plastic cup. A keg back then cost $30 and dispensed about 165 beers. Four or five kegs could last the night, and with five bucks from each of two hundred revelers, Mann could make a healthy profit. One year, the Ames High yearbook had a photo of a smiling cornfield-keg host holding a huge fan of $5 bills.

Some of the girls started attending the cornfield keggers when they were fifteen years old. Kelly's mom even drove her to her first cornfield party, nine miles out of town, and wondered why a guy was at the edge of the field, collecting money from everyone. "We all have to help pay for the band and the pig roast," Kelly told her mother. "There's a band back there. And a big pig, too." Her mother was quizzical, but accepted the explanation and drove away. The boy who promised to drive the girls home ended up too drunk to drive, so fifteen-year-old Karla, who had no license, took the wheel. It was pitch-dark, far from civilization, on the b.u.mpiest dirt roads, but she got the girls in the car safely back to Ames.

The keggers were a blast. Some boy would bring a boom box, with Ted Nugent or Bruce Springsteen blasting out of the speakers. Or the kids would stand around singing all the bombastic lyrics to songs on Meat Loaf's Bat Out of h.e.l.l Bat Out of h.e.l.l alb.u.m. alb.u.m.

As they became more accustomed to those keggers, the Ames girls brought their predictable personalities. Sheila, so often the life of any party, could walk into a cornfield and, like a character from Cheers, Cheers, elicit shouts of "Sheila!" Everyone knew her name and was glad to see her. elicit shouts of "Sheila!" Everyone knew her name and was glad to see her.

Meanwhile, Marilyn, the doctor's daughter, attended these parties warily, hoping not to get in trouble. She feared embarra.s.sing her family, as if a headline-"Doctor's Underage Daughter Caught Drinking Deep in Cornfields"-might be splashed across the next day's Ames Tribune Ames Tribune. Her clearest memory of a cornfield kegger was the time the cops came and she ran for her life deep into the field, the crunching and cracking of stalks at her feet. She stood hiding behind the corn, waiting for the coast to clear, her heart pounding.

Now as adults, when the girls spoon servings of corn onto their children's dinner plates, these are the sorts of memories that some of them think about.

7.The Intervention

Lately, when the Ames girls trade emails and phone calls about their daughters' social situations, they're often aghast at how girls today treat each other. Day after day, their daughters have to contend with stereotypical mean girls who are adept at belittling them, or pointing out their flaws, or telling them "you don't belong."

A couple of the Ames girls have daughters who hover at the edges of their social group, yearning to be more accepted. It can be heart-breaking for a mother to watch, especially these mothers, who feel blessed to have had ten close friends in their childhoods. Some of their children have struggled to make a meaningful connection with just one or two other girls, and even then there's a risk that the other girls will turn on them.

Here at the reunion, one of the Ames girls describes an incident that upset her twelve-year-old daughter. Her daughter had left her cell phone somewhere, and another girl got hold of it and decided to make some mischief by sending a text message to a certain boy: "I love you. How far will you go with me?" The text messaging became more explicit from there.

The Ames girl's daughter-she doesn't want to be identified-was distraught that her friend was pretending to be her. She considered this girl a close confidant, and more than the embarra.s.sment and humiliation she felt, she was upset that the trust between them had been violated. She and the girl remained friendly, but it was a tough lesson about the realities of social interactions today.

Researchers worry about this current generation of girls. Studies suggest that the average girl today is likely to grow up to be a lifelong dieter, to have a distorted body image, and to be emotionally scarred by cliques. Some communities are now hosting girls' empowerment workshops, where session leaders try to boost girls' self-esteem. One facilitator who gives such workshops to families in the Midwest, Kimber Bishop-Yanke, leaves parents wincing as she delivers the bad news: "We have a lot of girls walking around saying mean things to themselves: 'I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm stupid.' " She tells parents to notice body language: "When a girl doesn't feel confident, you can watch her body shrink." At her workshops, she offers a host of warning signs: Many girls get heavier before they shoot up in height, so comments from parents or mean-spirited peers about their weight can be traumatizing. There is also great peer pressure in today's s.e.xualized culture: If girls' bodies haven't yet developed, they may be shunned by their cliques. That's why parents such as the Ames girls are being told that it's crucial to monitor influences in girls' lives-to know not just their friends, but their friends' parents.

A 2008 study t.i.tled "A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem" labeled girls' low self-esteem "a national crisis." In part because of bullying and the troubling way girls sometimes interact, 70 percent of girls feel they don't measure up to others. In the study, conducted by StrategyOne, an applied research firm, 75 percent of girls with low self-esteem engaged in harmful activities, such as disordered eating, cutting themselves or being mean to other girls.

Just before the reunion at Angela's, the Ames girls traded emails about the mean-girl factor in their kids' lives. Several of them commented, in essence: "We were never like that."

When Jenny read those email exchanges, she felt she had to say something. "Oh yes, we were certainly like that," she typed back. She reminded them: In their heart of hearts, they know they had their mean streaks, too. Jenny was referring mostly to a 1980 incident that, using modern-day parlance, they now call "the intervention." By definition, that's when a group of people get together to help a mutual friend straighten out her life. But that's not really what happened that night in 1980, and the girls know it.

For years, they've mostly resisted mentioning that incident to each other, because some of them feel too embarra.s.sed and guilty. Even here at the reunion, despite the deep reminiscing going on, there's a reluctance to discuss it until Sally gives the OK.

"It's fine," says Sally. "I've never forgotten what happened, but I've forgiven all of it."

Now a popular fifth-grade teacher in Spencer, Iowa, Sally is funny and laid back, and she carries herself with great self-confidence. She has a good marriage and an easy relationship with her two daughters, twelve and fourteen. People describe her as very together and levelheaded.

When she was young, however, Sally certainly was not the coolest of the Ames girls. In high school, she was part of the group in large measure because Cathy wanted her to be. Cathy's friendship with Sally-dating back to first grade with Sheila at St. Cecilia-was rooted in loyalty, history and the comfort of familiarity. Cathy also just loved spending time with Sally. Except for Sheila, the other Ames girls didn't have those same bonds with Sally. They knew she was very smart and sweet, with a big heart and a sure sense of humor. But they also found her to be too quiet, too shy, too much of a tag-along, and too clueless around boys. Unlike Marilyn, a square who was comfortable seeing herself as a slight outsider in the group, Sally didn't have a clear sense of how she fit in, or even how she wanted to fit in.

Given the ambivalent feelings a few of the girls had for Sally, Cathy felt a responsibility to look after her welfare in the group. When all the Ames girls went to a movie, she sat next to Sally. If they were all heading out for fast food, she'd ride there with Sally. If plans were being made for a Sat.u.r.day night, she'd remind everyone, "Don't forget to pick up Sally." At least once, a few of them promised to pick up Sally and never showed up to get her. To this day, her mother still remembers Sally waiting by the door for that promised ride.Sally and Cathy, then and now Sally could be fun and likeable, but she also resisted growing up as fast as some of the others, and they were irritated by that. During high school, there was a Halloween costume party, and most of the girls chose to dress in flattering, even provocative, ways. Sally came dressed as a nun, which led to a bit of eye-rolling by some of the other girls.

Then came the school-sponsored East Coast Trip in eleventh grade, which most of the girls signed up for. This was a sightseeing tour of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and from the time the bus left Iowa, Sally sensed that she was being left out. When all the students went together to see Annie, Annie, some of the girls weren't especially friendly to her. She had trouble connecting with Sheila and Karen. She roomed with Jenny, but Jenny was a bit cool at times. Karla, Diana and Kelly were sometimes off on their own. (The three of them got a restaurant to serve them wine and bought themselves a some of the girls weren't especially friendly to her. She had trouble connecting with Sheila and Karen. She roomed with Jenny, but Jenny was a bit cool at times. Karla, Diana and Kelly were sometimes off on their own. (The three of them got a restaurant to serve them wine and bought themselves a Playgirl Playgirl magazine. The school had advised all the students to bring raincoats, and so all three bought matching trench coats and walked around New York like teenaged spies. One highlight: ringing the doorbell to get into a "naughty lingerie" shop.) magazine. The school had advised all the students to bring raincoats, and so all three bought matching trench coats and walked around New York like teenaged spies. One highlight: ringing the doorbell to get into a "naughty lingerie" shop.) As all the other girls buddied up, Sally felt alone. In New York one night, some of the girls made plans to go to a restaurant, and Sally overheard someone saying, "Why does Sally have to come with us?" To her face, someone else said, "Oh, you're coming, too?" That night at dinner, Sally was ordering her meal, and one of the girls-who it was, she can't recall-actually interrupted her and said, "We don't care what you want!" There was a bit of snickering around the table.

Sally saw clearly that she was being excluded, but she couldn't figure out why. She fell asleep saying to herself, "I wonder what I did to them. Why don't they want to be with me?" She took the hint, though. For the rest of the trip, she palled around mostly with a girl from outside the group, as she counted the hours until the bus would return her to Iowa.

Cathy, her closest friend, hadn't been on that East Coast adventure. And when everyone returned, a few of the girls took Cathy aside and complained that Sally wasn't fitting in.

Cathy talked to her mother about the problem. "I should have gone on the East Coast trip," she said. "If I had been there with Sally, none of this would have happened. Now they're ganging up on her and I don't know what to do." The girls saw her as Sally's keeper and held her responsible. At the same time, she felt completely protective of Sally, her oldest and sweetest friend.

Her mother listened and then weighed in. "If the girls have a problem with Sally, rather than being mean to her behind her back, they ought to get together to discuss things maturely. Invite them over to our house. You can all hash things out here." It was well-meaning advice. Cathy's mother a.s.sumed the girls would talk, hug and move on.

A slumber party was planned, and the girls arrived at Cathy's house with their sleeping bags. They first made small talk with Cathy's mom, then headed down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where they sat in a circle on the carpeted floor. Some of the girls were busy elsewhere and didn't make it over that night. Still, enough of them showed up to make a full circle.

Cathy was going to serve as a sort of moderator, but she had only to introduce the issue and the other girls immediately started running with it. At first, there were nitpicking comments. The girls said they were bugged by the way Sally dressed, talked and ate. They talked about her lack of skills at Friday night parties. "You just kind of stand there," someone said. "You don't partic.i.p.ate in the party."

Another of the girls chimed in with "You've got to be more fun. Partic.i.p.ate more! Talk to the boys. You're like a wallflower. And when one of us stands up to go to the next room, you don't have to stand up and follow us. You're too much of a tag-along."

It went on like that for a while, with the girls telling Sally everything they found wrong with her. And there seemed no clear sense that the piling on would ever end, since no one had anywhere to go. This was, after all, a sleepover.

Cathy sat next to Sally through all of it, as if proximity could protect her friend from some of the verbal pummeling. Cathy knew this "intervention" was not what her mother had antic.i.p.ated, but she couldn't find the words, or maybe the courage, to defend her friend forcefully enough. Even though Cathy wasn't agreeing with the other girls, just by being in the room she felt like a co-conspirator.

As the girls listed her alleged shortcomings, Sally felt stunned. She thought to herself, "I still don't get it. What did I do?" But she couldn't muster up those words to deliver them. She just sat there, feeling her heart beating in her chest, barely defending herself. And then, finally, someone said it: "We're not sure you should be hanging out with us anymore. You're too different from us."

Sally looked over at Cathy, who had tears welling up in her eyes. Everyone was silent, looking down in their laps, until Sally finally spoke. "OK. . . . OK. . . . If that's how you feel . . . OK."

For Sally, there would be no slumber party. In her head she was thinking, "Well, screw all of you!" But she couldn't bring herself to say that. She gathered up her stuff, said good-bye, and quietly left. Only after she was out the door did she allow herself to cry.

When she got to her house, Sally went into her mother's bedroom. By then, she was really bawling. She felt devastated. After hearing the whole story, her mother told her: "You know, they aren't necessarily the nicest group of girls." Her mom encouraged Sally to strengthen her relationships with other, less catty girls at school. "You're a great person. You have other girls in your life. They'll be nicer friends for you."

Sally's mother didn't consider getting on the phone with other parents to complain about what their daughters had said and done. That might be how such matters play out these days, when parents seem so overprotective, but back then parents tended to be more hands-off. Besides, Sally's mother knew any meddling by her wouldn't make the other girls embrace Sally. If they didn't want her daughter in their clique, then good riddance.

Looking back decades later, Sally says the intervention was truly a defining moment for her, devastating and painful, but at the same time liberating and life-changing. "Some of what was said had been true," she says. "I wasn't always comfortable around the guys they were hanging out with. Some of them even scared me a little.

"After feeling beat up by my friends and going home and telling my mom, she said exactly what I needed to hear. She did not go to the other moms to try to fix everything. Instead, she reminded me that I was a smart, funny, kind person who had a lot to offer and I had plenty of other friends.

"This was a great lesson in parenting for me. It is not our job, as parents, to go to coaches, teachers and other parents and try to make everything run smoothly for our kids. A lot of parents try talking to the teacher to get something special for their children. They talk to coaches to get their kids more playing time. They're trying to make everything just right for their kids. They want a perfect world for them. But I've come to see that our job is to help our kids become people who are capable and believe in themselves enough to deal with the world. Our job is to help our kids function in the world. And that's why my mother's response was such an 'aha!' moment for me. I watched her do that."

In the days after the intervention, Sally says she felt the need to take an honest look at who she was. That soul-searching process turned out to be a gift she gave to herself. "It was a moment of self-definition for me, and it was good because it made me more a.s.sertive," she says. "I realized that although I sometimes made mistakes, I was pretty happy with the person I had become and didn't feel the need to change for anyone. It was wonderful and comfortable and a huge relief to come to that realization. It helped me gain confidence."

Just sixteen years old, Sally was able to look maturely at some underlying reasons for the other girls' behavior. She thought through why some of the other girls had turned on her and decided that perhaps they envied her relationship with Cathy, because they wanted to be closer to Cathy themselves. She concluded: "There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not going to question myself. I'm going to try to be resilient. I have other friends, and I can fit in with a lot of people, and that's what I'm going to do."

As an adult, she looks back with appreciation. "The intervention allowed me to get to know a lot of other girls I never would have spent time with if that had not happened. And I was able to go off to college with a pretty good sense of who I was."

There are some old photos being pa.s.sed around here at the reunion that do not include Sally. They are physical reminders of the period when she was out of the group.

By the time high school was over, however, the girls all found themselves concluding that they wanted Sally around. She had remained close with Cathy, of course, and she inched her way back toward the others after they invited her along to parties or got together with her to do homework. She'd also see Karla, Karen, Cathy and Jenny on the days she worked at Boyd's, scooping ice cream, so that kept them connected.

Some of the photos the girls brought to the reunion show the other ten girls sitting together at the Ames High graduation, or embracing each other after the ceremony, all smiles. Sally isn't in any of these photos. The girls did invite Sally to sit with them at the ceremony. She considered joining them-it would have felt good to be with them-but in the end she chose to sit with her other friends that day. "Maybe I went with my other friends because I felt they had always been loyal to me," Sally says now. "Maybe it was payback for the intervention."

Because the girls could never bring themselves to discuss what happened that night at Cathy's, it remained an unresolved regret. Even after Jenny was in her forties, it weighed on her that she thought she had never adequately apologized to Sally. So she sent her an email asking for forgiveness. "What we did was rude and cruel and petty and high-schoolish," she wrote. "I feel really horrible about it." She said she liked to think that they were not mean girls back then, but she acknowledged that what they'd done that night was mean and awful.

"Your apology is accepted," Sally wrote back. "I haven't forgotten about it. But I forgave you all a long time ago. It was a painful time for me, but I learned a lot from that. And I think it has made me a better mother and a better teacher."

(Recently, Jenny was surprised to come upon notes of apology that she had written to Sally back in high school. She hadn't remembered these attempts to say how sorry she was after the intervention, and was glad to discover that her younger self had recognized her mistakes and taken the initiative.) Now that the girls have begun talking about the intervention as adults, Sally says, "I've received some beautiful apologies from some of the others, too. They are nice, but not necessary. All of us behaved badly or said things we shouldn't have at one time or another, but we all seem to be forgiving people. That's probably one reason our friendship has survived for so many years."

Looking back, the girls want to believe that they weren't as hard-hearted as it seemed. They really did have Sally's interests at heart, they say, and in their own clueless teenaged way, they were just trying to offer Sally tips for overcoming her shyness and being cooler around boys. "I'd like to think that if anyone else had said these things about Sally, that we would have gone to her defense in a heartbeat," says Karen. It was like the dynamics within a family; family members can criticize one another, but no one else can.

Cathy says the incident was character-building for some of the girls. "In my case, it helped me learn that I have to let people take care of themselves." Now, as an adult living in California, Cathy has noticed that she continues to follow a pattern in which she becomes a protector and supporter of certain friends. "I used to always have a friend who I'd bring along with me, and there were people who didn't warm up to her right away. I would have to convince them how great she was." She says the Ames girls remained that group of eleven after high school because of Sally's maturity: "We're all still together because of the kind of person Sally is. She was able to see what happened for what it was: stupid-girl nitpicking."

Sally has clear memories of who said what in Cathy's bas.e.m.e.nt-"when people say nasty things to you, you always remember," she says-but she's now grateful for it on other fronts, too.

Memories of the incident have led her to strive to instill self-confidence in her two daughters. She's proud that both of them aren't clingy with their friends. Meanwhile, as a teacher, she is hyperaware of mean-girl tendencies. In her fifth-grade cla.s.ses over the years, there have been "cool" cliques-girls who pay more attention to how they dress or girls who have a more sophisticated sense of how to flirt with the boys. These groups have sometimes excluded other girls in the cla.s.s, who are a bit slower socially. Sally sometimes thinks it's just that the slower groups aren't yet ready to be preteens; they want to be children for a while longer.

Sally once saw a girl get booted from a clique in the wake of an argument. Sally was impressed with how the ostracized girl responded: She had enough self-awareness and self-esteem not to fall apart over what happened. And eventually, she found her way back into the group. Sally was proud of her. "She reminded me of me."

Back in Ames, Sally's mother knows that the Ames girls are all middle-aged women now, and she appreciates that they have supported and loved Sally for decades. But she has never forgotten that night Sally came home from Cathy's house in tears, and how her heart ached for her daughter. "I think the girls now recognize that what they did, well, they shouldn't have done it. That's all. They shouldn't have done it."

There was another episode in the girls' pre-adult lives that offered insights into how they carried themselves, and how others perceived them. It was the infamous graduation-cake incident.

The night they graduated from high school, the girls gathered for a sleepover party at Cathy's house. Her mom had ordered a cake from the local supermarket's bakery, and the frosting on it was supposed to read "Congratulations S Sisters!" The "S," of course, was an inside joke, because kids in school called them "The s.h.i.t Sisters."

Cathy's dad picked up the cake, brought it home, opened the box, and no one could believe what was inside. Someone at the supermarket bakery had written "s.h.i.t SISTERS SUCK!" in large letters on the cake. Even worse, all over the cake were giant gobs of brown frosting. With its base of white icing, the cake resembled a snow-covered field after a pack of dogs had stopped by to leave their droppings everywhere. There were pretty flowers made of pink and green icing all over the cake, but each flower was topped with a gross brown glob. It was a cake you wouldn't want to eat.

The girls were more amused than upset-Karla immediately took a photo of the cake for her sc.r.a.pbook-but Cathy's father was livid. The girls had never seen him so mad. This purposely disfigured expletive cake just set him off. "Let's go, girls!" he said, and Karla, Kelly, Cathy and a few of the others piled into his Ford LTD and sped with him back to the supermarket. He confronted the store manager, who was stunned and apologetic. The manager vowed to mount a full investigation of his entire bakery staff. If there were fingerprints on the brown frosting container, he'd find them.

The girls knew, of course, that some people didn't like their little clique. Several times, Jenny's car wouldn't start because other kids had put sugar in her gas tank. Some of the girls' houses got egged by male cla.s.smates angry at them for dating those boys from nearby Marshalltown. And once "s.h.i.t Sisters" was spray-painted on the steps leading into Cathy's house.

But who at that supermarket would want to ruin their cake?

Suspicion immediately fell on deli employee Nancy Derks, a fellow graduating Ames High senior. Nancy, who hung out with the female jocks at the school, considered the "s.h.i.ts" as a group to be prissy, looks-focused, boy-teasing conformists. At the same time, however, she was neutral about most of the girls individually. In fact, she admired some of them. Now living on a farm in Stanhope, Iowa, and working in marketing at a meat-processing plant, she hasn't seen any of the girls since high school. But she says she had no issues with Marilyn ("She was really smart and had her own mind") or Sheila ("very bubbly") or Sally ("I remember her as Cathy's sidekick, and she was nice"). She was friends with Kelly in junior high and recalls her as a good athlete. In fact, she was OK with most of the girls. It was just that as a clique, they completely annoyed her.

At the supermarket, the deli section was adjacent to the bakery section, and Nancy had a friend from Ames High who worked in the bakery. This girl also was no fan of the S Sisters, and when she arrived at work on the afternoon of graduation, she saw that the cake had been baked and frosted earlier in the day. She called Nancy over from the deli section. From the moment they saw that cake, they knew they had to defile it. "It was just too tempting," Nancy now says. They took out the frosting and turned "Congratulations S Sisters" into "s.h.i.t SISTERS SUCK." Once that was accomplished, adding the brown globs seemed like adding appropriate punctuation points.

After they were finished ruining the cake, they stapled shut the lid to the box a couple dozen times, so whoever came to pick it up wouldn't bother to open it at the store. Sure enough, it remained unopened until Cathy's dad got the box home.

Nancy and her friend were long gone from the supermarket by the time Cathy's dad and the girls showed up to complain. But the manager soon figured out that Nancy and her friend were likely suspects and he called them in. He told them that if they didn't confess, he'd hire a handwriting a.n.a.lyst to determine who wrote "s.h.i.t SISTERS SUCK!" in frosting. He worried that Cathy's father could sue for defamation of character. He told Nancy he had called the cops, and that she needed to go down to the police station to confess before things got even worse for her.

Nancy did as she was told, and the police officer seemed intrigued by the whole escapade. It was the first cake caper of his career, and he said he appreciated that she had owned up to it. "Could you really have done a handwriting a.n.a.lysis on the frosting?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "You wrote in block letters. So we couldn't have a.n.a.lyzed it. That's why we're glad you confessed."

Nancy was charged with criminal mischief, had to pay a $50 fine, and was fired from her job at the supermarket, which she had held for three years. The manager fired her over the phone. Her friend, however, was fired in person, and the manager yelled so loudly that every shopper in the store heard him. (That helped news of the defiled cake to spread around Ames.) When Sally's mother learned about the defaced cake, she a.s.sumed the Ames girls had been unkind to the culprits. Given what had happened to Sally that night in Cathy's bas.e.m.e.nt, she thought to herself: "People wouldn't just write something like that on a cake unless they'd been hurt in some way."

But actually, Nancy Derks says, the girls hadn't been mean to her or to anyone else she knew. It was just that some girls at Ames High were put off by their friendship, by the sometimes haughty way they carried themselves, by the way they interacted-by their whole mini-sorority-like sisterhood. In truth, of course, some girls just envied the bonds between them.

Through the years, Nancy has told friends the story about the cake, the frosting/handwriting a.n.a.lysis threat, and her confession to the police. People find it amusing. She has no regrets about her decision to find that brown frosting and squish it into globs on that graduation cake. "I'd do it again," she says.

Almost thirty years later, the girls can now look at the photo of that graduation cake in Karla's sc.r.a.pbook and see it as a kind of badge of honor-proof that they didn't go unnoticed in Ames. But they also know that the "s.h.i.t Sisters" cake photo is a reminder of how others sometimes perceived them and how they weren't always their best selves, whether to the wider world or to each other.

8.FBB and Other Secrets

FBB.

What was FBB, anyway?

Here at the North Carolina reunion, Jenny has brought letters from Sheila and Karla, written decades ago, and FBB is scrawled on more than a few of them.

"Fabulous Best Buddies. That's what it meant," says Jenny.

"You're so polished now," Karla says. "Maybe that's what we'd like it to be. That's not what it was."

FBB?.

"It was farts, burps and b.o.o.bs," says Karla.