Emily was very much a country girl and never had been in cities much. She’d been to Chicago several times, Detroit a couple, and on the outskirts of Philadelphia visiting Eve a couple years ago. But this was her first trip to New York, and while she knew things were OK, there was a part of it that frightened and disgusted her. How could people live all jammed in on top of each other like this?

Two days before, JoAnne had been just about ready to hop in the car and start driving for New York to do what she could to help Dave. Emily had told her repeatedly that right at the moment they didn’t know how to find him and that things seemed pretty confused there – as strangers, things would be even worse, and eventually the logic got through to her.

Then, after they’d gotten back to JoAnne’s from the hospital, where they’d seen Vicky, Jason, and Melissa, Dave had called to report that they were all safe at Shae’s apartment on Staten Island. Again, JoAnne had been all but ready to start driving, but by now it was late, and both Dave and Emily suggested that they all get a good night’s sleep before making any decisions, not that he expected to be able to get to sleep. Emily talked to him briefly to get a few details for the story for the Courier, and told him that she’d offered to come with JoAnne if she could be of any help at all. That seemed to put a lid on it and JoAnne was winding down when Eve called back half an hour later – Dave was out like a light, the result of a combination of a good stiff drink that had been dosed with a sleeping pill, and a little light hypnosis. Still, it probably wasn’t a good idea for them to start for New York until there had been a chance to assess things in the morning.

After “accidentally” forgetting to give JoAnne her car keys, Emily walked down to the Courier, re-did the front page story, updating it with the information Dave had given her and a picture of Julie that JoAnne had given her and e-mailed the page to the printer. With the paper finally done, she walked over to the store, hopped on the Harley, and headed for home, to find her family all asleep.

She made a point of getting up when Kevin did, if only to let him know what had been happening and that she might have to make a fast trip to New York with JoAnne. Then, once Kevin was out the door, she had another cup of coffee and went to get the kids up, mostly to give them the same message and maybe talk with them a bit about what had happened the day before. It turned out that last evening Kevin had taken the effort to have a good, sensitive conversation with them about the day, so it looked like they would deal with it all right. But, in the middle of the conversation, Kayla made a suggestion – wouldn’t it be a good idea to have some kind of fundraiser or event to show support for Mr. Patterson and the people in New York? It might help people in Bradford feel like they were doing something useful, rather than just watching TV. Emily agreed that it would be a good idea, and then Kayla added the suggestion that since she was the mayor, she might be the right person to get the ball rolling.

The kid made sense, Emily had thought as she rode the Harley back to the store. Predictably, the topic of discussion of everyone who came in was the World Trade Center. Several times she mentioned Kayla’s idea to people, and everyone seemed to think it was a good idea. So once the morning rush died out she got out her cell phone and started laying the groundwork.

It was along in the afternoon when JoAnne called back to report that Dave had called, sounding much better. He’d said there was no reason they couldn’t come, except that it might be better if they didn’t plan on driving all night; an early-morning start would be better, since it would be better if they didn’t arrive in the wee small hours. As it was, Emily suggested that they wait until she got off shift, drive east for a while to at least be moving in the right direction, then get a motel for the night.

Even after a long drive they didn’t have much trouble finding the apartment complex where Shae lived. Soon, they were taking the elevator up to her apartment. She was waiting for them when the elevator opened. Although Emily knew her well, it had been over a year since she had seen her, and in that time she’d forgotten a little of the reality of her friend.

Simply put, Shayna Kirkendahl was the tallest person Emily had ever met. Period. She stood just shy of six foot eight in her stocking feet, six inches taller than the tallest guy in the class – Dave – and almost a foot and a half taller than Emily. A lot of kids would have been teased and shamed to be such a freak – Emily knew of tall kids slouching all the time so as to not stick out, but Shae faced things head on. All through school, even in elementary school, when most kids wore tennis shoes and the like, Shae had worn four- and five-inch heels and sometimes even higher. The exception was on the basketball court, where she and another girl had led the Lady Bulldogs to two straight state championships, the only ones Bradford had ever won in playoff action. At an effective height of over seven feet in heels, she told anyone who commented about her choice of footwear, “As long as I’m a freak I might as well enjoy it.” She still wore heels all over the place, and today was wearing a pair of short shorts that showed off her long, shapely legs – a forty-six-inch inseam if Emily remembered correctly from high school.

Emily had lost track of Shae for several years, up until the tenth reunion three years before. It turned out that she’d covered local sports on TV for a while, then the Women’s NBA for the World Sports Network. By the time of the reunion she was in the midst of another job change and now was the title character on a low-budget cable TV kids show where she played, of all things, a little kid. Not a normal little kid, since Avalon wasn’t exactly a normal neighborhood. There was a family of giants living up the street, and Shae played their child – just a child who was two feet taller than the rest of the adults in the neighborhood, all of whom were played by actors who stood less than five feet. Kayla and JJ were beyond that kind of a little kids’ TV show, but Emily had watched several episodes and thought that it was really well done. A lot of the message of the show was “It’s OK to be different,” and Emily thought that it was a cute twist on the message.

As good as Shae was with kids – and she was very good with them – she’d never gotten married or had any of her own. When they’d met at Eve’s a year ago last summer, she’d explained that, while she knew a few guys who approached her height, she was reluctant to marry them, simply because she didn’t want to risk having kids as tall as she was, or even taller.

Emily and JoAnne followed Shae into her apartment, where Emily immediately felt like a kid again herself. Not that the apartment was anything kid-like, it was a normal single adult’s apartment – but everything in it was Shae-sized. The furniture was oversized, the tables and counters higher than normal, the doorways much higher than normal. It made Emily feel like she’d shrunk at least a foot.

Dave and his two boys Tyler and Cameron were there, and they rushed over to meet JoAnne. The boys were both five, born less than a year apart and in the same grade. Emily had not previously met the kids, and hadn’t seen Dave in several years. The class salutatorian, right behind Jennlynn Swift, he’d somehow managed to get accepted to Columbia, and except for brief visits had lived in New York since weeks after graduating from high school. Now he was a book editor at a publishing company, specializing in science fiction and fantasy. From what Emily knew from JoAnne, he made more money than anyone in Bradford, and his wife Julie had been even higher paid. He clearly was not very happy, and he had every right to feel that way after losing his wife in such a horrific fashion. He’d been talking to Julie on his cell phone when the tower went down, and on the phone the other night he’d told Emily that her last words had been, “Dave, I love you!”

Emily just stood back and let the Pattersons have their family time, while she and Shae talked softly. Shae told her that the boys were getting along all right since they didn’t quite fathom the reality of what had happened. While Dave had coped reasonably well yesterday, he’d had a very rough night and was quite subdued today. “I should have doped him up again,” Shae whispered. “But he’d gotten along so well yesterday I thought it might be all right. He gets a pill tonight whether he likes it or not.”

Emily and JoAnne hadn’t been in the apartment long before Eve arrived. Though in the last few years Emily had come to both respect and genuinely like the curvy little long-haired blonde, whenever she thought back to who she had been in high school there could not help but be a serious touch of surrealism.

Looking back, she had to be honest and say that she hadn’t much liked Denis Riley, but then no one had, except for Shae. It was probably a reach to say that back in those years they had been best friends, but it was fair to say that she had been about his only friend. Late in their junior year, it had become something more than that – the two of them had gotten a serious romance going, hanging out together a lot, dating, and like that. Emily could remember them getting in trouble a few times over some serious hot kisses in the cafeteria. It seemed very strange, for this nearly seven-foot girl to be having a romance with this dorky five-foot boy, but strange things had been known to happen in high school romances and people got used to it.

The truth didn’t come out until the aftermath of their tenth reunion three years back: there hadn’t been any romance at all! It had all been an act, a cover story to hide what was really happening – Denis was in the process of becoming a girl, with Shae and his family’s active assistance.

It was only then that Emily and the other members of the Class of ’88 discovered that as seniors Denis was only Denis at school – as soon as Shae drove him out of the parking lot after school, he’d revert to who he really was, a girl he’d named Eve. Emily had been surprised to discover that under the power of estrogen therapy Eve had bigger breasts than she had when they graduated – which was the last time that Eve presented herself to the world as Denis. She went to college as Eve, with Shae as her roommate. A year later she had the major gender reassignment surgery. It had been so successful, she’d told the class in front of her husband John, that none of the men she’d been to bed with in the couple years following had been able to tell the difference. John had known ahead of time, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Though Eve had followed a stranger road than anyone in the Class of ’88 other than Shae could have believed, she had followed it well, pushing ahead to her doctorate as a clinical psychologist, and now in a lucrative private practice in the Philadelphia area. She was bright, cheerful, likable and competent; a year and a half ago she and John had adopted two Russian orphans, and she was proving to be a good mother too. Though she knew better, Emily still found it hard to believe that she once could have been Denis Riley.

It had been just good luck that Eve had been available in New York to help out Dave and his family, just as she was now, helping them touch each other for strength and comfort without being pushy about it.

Once the tears dried a little bit, there was some updating to do; JoAnne and Emily had only heard bits and pieces of what had happened over the last two days, so they got a better outline.

“Dave,” Emily said as the topic wound down, “as far as anyone knows, you’re the only one from Bradford, or even from Hawthorne County to be directly affected by Tuesday. People feel like they should be doing something to help. Several people have suggested a benefit.”

“No, Emily,” he said immediately. “Not for me. Yes, I’m technically homeless right now, I don’t know how long it’ll be before I can get back in my apartment, it could be a couple days, it could be a month. I’ll probably have to move from there, but it’s really no big deal. Julie and I had money in the bank, money in the market, we had good insurance policies on each other, and I expect there’ll be a settlement sometime when all this washes out.”

“He’s not even lacking for a place to stay,” Shae added. “I told him he’s welcome to stay here as long as he likes, and I’ll be willing to help with the boys.”

“I was thinking on the way here,” JoAnne said, “That you might want to send the boys back with us for a while.”

“No, Mom,” he sighed. “Right now, they need their father more than anything else, to tell them they’re still loved.”

“I agree with Dave,” Eve nodded. “The boys are doing well so far, but that’s at least partly because Dave has put them ahead of everything else.”

“Well, you could come too,” JoAnne insisted. “That’d at least give you a place to stay, and you wouldn’t have to put Shae out.”

“No again, Mom,” he protested. “Granted, I’m not working now but it looks like I will be in a few days, as soon as the company sorts things out a little. I think the best thing that can happen to me is to get back to work and give me something to think about, some regular routine.”

“After this shock, it might be better if the boys were with someone they know,” she insisted, not willing to give in easily.

“They will be. They’ll be with me. Besides, if I send them off with you for a while, then Julie’s folks will want a turn, and believe me I’d rather have them with you than them. Now, that much said, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few days, so I’m not closing the door on the option, either.” To get off the topic he turned to Emily and continued, “I’m very grateful for the help I’ve had from Bradford, and especially the help I’ve had from you. I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and prayers. But I don’t want anyone out shaking the can for me. Money is the least of my worries.”

“People feel like they want to do something,” Emily countered. “Would you object to a fundraiser that would give the money to the Red Cross or one of the other relief efforts?”

“Fine with me,” Dave nodded. “I’d encourage it. I’ll even endorse it, send a message, something like that. I suppose from the way you said it that the notion is a little more advanced than just kicking it around.”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “We’re talking the high school gym, most likely a week from Saturday. Dayna and Sandy already said they’d play. Dayna knows a couple of the guys from Cold Spring Rain, and she thinks she can talk them into doing it for free, too.”

“That’d be a neat concert,” he nodded. “I used to love that group back when we were in high school. But Dayna and Sandy? That’s our Dayna, I presume, but who’s Sandy?”

“Oh, boy, you have been out of touch, haven’t you?” Emily grinned. “When Dayna went to Central the fall after we graduated, she met Sandy, who’s from the Detroit area. They hit it off in a flash and have been together almost ever since.”

“Close together,” Shae interrupted with a smirk.

“Well, yeah,” Emily said, eyeing the boys, each one clustered under one of their grandmother’s arms on the sofa. She chose her words carefully and continued, “Uh, very close. They live together in Bradford when they’re not on the road. It’s, uh, sort of the Bradford version of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ Everyone sort of knows what’s going on but no one admits it.”

“I get the picture,” Dave grinned. “That must keep the Bradford rumor mills churning.”

“Anyway,” Emily continued, ignoring the catty remark, “They’ve been traveling around the country in their motor home for years. Mostly they play renaissance faires, but they do some club dates, concerts, and like that, even grade schools. Their business cards say, ‘Wandering Medieval Minstrel’. They’ve done a number of CDs. One of their songs, Pick Me, Please made it onto the charts a few years ago.”

“In spite of Jennlynn and me, Dayna is still sort of the black sheep of the class,” Eve grinned. “The two of them, well, they have their good times.”

“Jennlynn?” Dave asked. “I’ve never heard a thing about her either. I always figured she married some minister somewhere.”

The whole room erupted in laughter – not a light titter, but a belly laugh, and from everyone but Dave and the boys. Even JoAnne was laughing. “Not quite,” she grinned, a little bit of a blush showing.

“We were there the night it came down,” Shae said. “What a night that was.”

“I wasn’t there, but I sure heard about it the next day,” Dave’s mom laughed.

“This sounds like a good one,” Dave grinned. “I’ve got to ask.”

“Emily, you were the one who got caught,” Eve grinned. “Why don’t you tell the story?”

“Except that you also did part of the catching,” Emily blushed again and glanced in the direction of the boys. “I’ll have to, uh, fuzz a couple things. It was a little over three years ago, Vicky and Shelly and I got the idea of having a tenth class reunion on homecoming weekend.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Dave nodded. “I’m beginning to think I should have gone after all.”

“You missed a good one,” Emily smiled. “Anyway, we had to track down a lot of people to send invitations. You’d be surprised how hard it was. You were easy. Jennlynn was hard, I almost gave up until I remembered Dayna saying that she’d run into her a few years ago, and it turned out she had an address in her journal. So I sent Jennlynn an invitation, and a few days later I got a phone call from her. Except for that little bit with Dayna, it was the first anyone had heard from her for years. She said she’d love to come, but she had an appointment the next day so couldn’t hang around, and wanted me to meet her at the airport in Hawthorne. I knew she was a pilot from the last time I’d seen her, so I figured she was flying her own plane in. I was right. Vicky and I went out to the airport, and here’s Jennlynn in this gleaming white Learjet.”

“Learjet?” Dave smiled. “She was flying it for someone?”

“She was flying it for herself,” Emily grinned. “She owns it and another one. I mean, this thing was so white and so well polished it almost hurt your eyes to look at it. Jennlynn gets out of the cockpit, and she’s absolutely gorgeous, like she’d just stepped out of Cosmopolitan. She told us it was worth over half a million dollars, and she’d paid cash for it.”

“And you passed that on to everyone else at the reunion,” Shae laughed.

“Well, I guess I did,” Emily replied sheepishly. “But how was I to know what else was going on? When we got down to the dinner, I had people stand up and introduce themselves, and tell us a little about what they’d been doing. So we got to Jennlynn, and she stood up and told us that she had her Ph.D., she was a development engineer working for this company in Phoenix, and on the side owned this aviation charter company, and had a retired general as a chief pilot. She explained a little later that she was a multimillionaire.”

“She must have done well for herself,” Dave grinned.

“Uh, yeah,” Emily blushed, looking at the grins on Shae, Eve, and JoAnne’s faces. “Then she said, and I quote, ‘My parents threw me out on my, uh, rear in 1990, so to get through college and part time ever since, I’ve worked in Nevada as a licensed legal p-r-o-s-t-i-t –”

“Jennlynn? You’re kidding!”

Emily shook her head. “Dayna confirmed it later, she’d known more about it than she’d been willing to tell us.”

Dave was still incredulous. “That must have dropped everyone’s jaw to the floor.”

“It gets worse,” Emily grinned. “I’m standing there, gasping for air, trying to think of something to say to break the silence. I finally babbled something like, ‘Is there anyone down at that end of the table I’ve missed?’ So then, this woman I didn’t recognize stands up and introduces herself. I’m still stunned, so I said something like I’m sorry but I didn’t remember her, and then Eve dropped her little bomb.”

“I would never have done it if Jennlynn hadn’t already had everyone stunned speechless,” Eve grinned. “As it turned out, I’m a little sorry I stole some of her thunder.”

“There was enough to go around,” Emily shook her head. “I learned later, more from Dayna than Jennlynn, that she’d made that announcement at the reunion so it would get around town. She knew her folks would hear about it and they’d know that everyone else in town knew.”

Dave knew well that Jennlynn’s father was the long-time pastor of the most conservative and obnoxious fundamentalist church in town. “She must have wanted blood and got it,” he nodded.

“She sure did,” Emily nodded. “By the bucketful. You still don’t mention her name in their presence.”

“Is she still, uh, doing that?”

“As far as anyone knows,” Emily nodded. “She really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Bradford or her parents. No one I know has talked to her since but Dayna, and apparently that doesn’t happen very often.”

Dave shook his head. “It sounds like we have a pretty wild class.”

“Oh, there are a few that are odder than the rest,” Emily grinned. “Shae and Eve, for example. Most everyone is pretty normal, most married now, most with kids, a few divorces. John Engler has gone through three wives at last count and I haven’t heard for a while, one of them was Mandy Paxton. Vicky Varney married a real jerk, had a messy divorce, got married again last summer and just had a baby. I mean, stuff like that, really pretty normal. Of course, there are stories you haven’t heard. There have to be some that I haven’t heard, and they make me wonder sometimes. About a quarter of the class has just vanished, disappeared, not a trace. About half of what’s left I’m in good contact with, and the rest, well, they’re like Jennlynn, or like you were, I have an address, maybe now and then I hear a little, but not much.”

“She often asks me about you when I go into the Spee-D-Mart,” JoAnne conceded. “I’ve mostly said things are pretty much the same, since, really, there hasn’t been much actual news.” She let out a sigh. “At least until Tuesday.”

“Right,” Emily agreed. “I think the last news before then was when you moved from what JoAnne called ‘midtown’ to Battery Park. That meant nothing to me except for an address change on my mailing list. Until Tuesday I wasn’t even sure you were on Manhattan.”

Dave shook his head again. “You know, I find that even more impressive. Here I’m all but out of contact, I really haven’t had much of anything to do with the class since I graduated, but this happens and there you are.”

“Just because we hadn’t heard from you for a while doesn’t mean you’re not a friend anymore,” Emily said flatly. “The class of ’88 may have scattered to the four winds, near and far, and there aren’t many of us, but we still try to take care of each other when we can. This isn’t the first time.”

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