“So how was it?” she asked me once we got on the highway. She’d set the cruise control, adjusted the air-conditioning, and now seemed ready to make peace. “Or what you saw of it, that is.”

“It was okay,” I said. “The seminars were kind of boring.”

“Hmm,” she said, and I figured that I was pushing it. I knew my mother, though. She’d push back. “Well, maybe if you’d stayed the whole time you might have gotten more out of it.”

“Maybe,” I said. In the side mirror, I could see the mountains retreating behind us, bit by bit.

I knew there were a lot of things she probably wanted to say to me. Maybe she wanted to ask me why I cared about Michael Sherwood, since she’d hardly heard me mention him. Or why I’d hated the idea of camp right from the start, without even giving it a chance. Or maybe it was more, like why in just the last few months even the sight of her coming toward me was enough to get my guard up. Why we’d gone from best friends to something neither of us could rightly define. But she didn’t say anything.

“Mom?”

She turned to look at me, and I could almost hear her take a breath, readying herself for whatever I might try next. “Yes?”

“Thanks for letting me come home.”

She turned back to the road. “It’s all right, Halley,” she said to me softly as I leaned back in my seat. “It’s all right.”

My mother and I had always been close. She knew everything about me, from the boys I liked to the girls I envied; after school I always sat in the kitchen eating my snack and doing homework while I listened for her car to pull up. I always had something to tell her. After my first school dance she sat with me eating ice cream out of the carton while I detailed every single thing that had happened from first song to last. On Saturdays, when my dad pulled morning shift at the radio station, we had Girls’ Lunch Out so we could keep up with each other. She loved fancy pasta places, and I only liked fast food and pizza, so we alternated. She made me eat snails, and I watched her gulp down (enjoying it more than she ever would admit) countless Big Macs. We had one rule: we always ordered two desserts and shared. Afterwards we’d hit the mall looking for sales, competing to see who could find the best bargain. She usually won.

She wrote articles in journals and magazines about our successful relationship and how we’d weathered my first year of high school together, and spoke at schools and parents’ meetings about Staying in Touch with Your Teen. Whenever her friends came over for coffee and complained about their kids running wild or doing drugs, she’d just shake her head when they asked how she and I did so well.

“I don’t know,” she’d say. “Halley and I are just so close. We talk about everything.”

But suddenly, at the beginning of that summer, something changed. I can’t say when it started exactly. But it happened after the Grand Canyon.

Each summer, my parents and I took a vacation. It was our big splurge of the year, and we always went someplace cool like Mexico or Europe. This year, we took a cross-country road trip to California and then the Grand Canyon, stopping here and there, sucking up scenery and visiting relatives. My mother and I had a great time; my father did most of the driving, and the two of us hung out, talking and listening to the radio, sharing clothes, making up songs and jokes as state lines and landmarks passed by. My father and I forced her to eat fast food almost every day as payback for a year’s worth of arugula salad and prosciutto tortellini. We spent two weeks together, bickering sometimes but mostly just having fun, me and my parents, on the road.

As soon as I got home, though, three very big things happened. First, I started my job at Milton’s. Scarlett and I had spent the end of the school year going around filling out applications, and it was the only place with enough positions to hire us both. By the time I got home from the trip, Scarlett had already been there two weeks, so she taught me the ropes. Second, she introduced me to Ginny Tabor, whom she’d met at the pool while I’d been gone. Ginny was a cheerleader with a wild streak a mile wide and a reputation among the football team for more than her cheers and famous midair splits. She lived a few miles away in the Arbors, a fancy development of Tudor houses with a country club, pool, and golf course. Ginny Tabor’s father was a dentist, and her mother weighed about eighty pounds, chain-smoked Benson and Hedges 100’s, and had skin that was as leathery as the ottoman in our living room. She threw money at Ginny and left us alone to prowl the streets of the Arbors on our way to the pool, or sneak out across the golf course at night to meet boys.

Which, in turn, led to the third big event that summer, when two weeks after coming home I broke off my dull, one-year romance with Noah Vaughn.

Noah was my first “boyfriend,” which meant we called each other on the phone and kissed sometimes. He was tall and skinny, with thick black hair and a bit of acne. His parents were best friends with mine, and we’d spent Friday night together, at our house or theirs, for most of my lifetime. He’d been all right for a start. But when I was inducted into the new crazy world of Ginny Tabor, he had to go.

He didn’t take it well. He sulked around, glowered at me, and still came over every Friday with his little sister and his parents, sitting stony-faced on the couch as I slipped out the door, yelling good-bye. I always said I was going to Scarlett’s, but instead we were usually meeting boys at the pool or hanging out with Ginny. My mother was more sad about our breakup than anyone; I think she’d half expected I’d marry him. But this was the New Me, someone I was evolving into with every hot and humid long summer day. I learned to smoke cigarettes, drank my first beer, got a deep tan, and double-pierced my ears as I began to drift, almost imperceptibly at first, from my mother.