of Jenny. As Jenny now recalls: “It was an act of love. It was just her way of saying, ‘Here you go. Here’s that picture of the two of you that you always wanted.’ ”
At the reunion, the other girls pass around the photo, laughing about Jenny’s oversized corsage and Dan’s oversized bow tie. They peek underneath to get a look at Jenny’s actual date in his gray suit. And they think about sweet, scheming Sheila with those scissors in her hand.
All the girls wish Sheila was here with them. It would be so fantastic to hear her recollections of how she doctored that photo. They’d have so much to ask her: What would she remember about the early years of their friendship that the rest of them don’t? What would be her take on all of their middle-aged issues?
“Remember how she laughed?” asks Cathy. “It was so great. It was never a put-on, either. When she found something funny, I mean, her laugh was just unaudited.”
The girls remember her childhood smile, too. “Sheila always smiled like she had a secret,” says Jenny.
Angela and Sheila
In their heads, all the girls hold on to an image of Sheila, smiling away. The old photos help. But that laugh of hers, that’s harder to summon up, and they long to hear it again. It’s funny, they say, what you miss most about a person.
I n the summer of 1979, Jenny and Karla went on vacation together to California, and Sheila sent them a letter. Almost all of it was devoted to bringing them up-to-date on her boy situation back in Iowa.
First, Sheila wrote, she went for a drive with their classmate Darwin, and though she was really excited to be with him, “we said absolutely nothing to each other.” Later she went to Doug’s house with Sally, Cathy and Angela. Darwin was there. “He was being weird and so was I (I was nervous),” so that ended up without much conversation, too. The next day, she talked to “Beeb, Joe and Wally,” a three-some whom she described, in order and very precisely, as “new, not cute, and sweet.”
The next night, Sheila went to a disco where she “tried to get rid of Steve.” Once he was out of the way, she danced with Joe, Dave, Randy and then Charlie. It was a fun night at the disco until one of the guys “got pissed at another guy”—over a girl, of course—and started pounding his fists into a wall until they were bleeding. “It was terrible,” Sheila wrote, before jumping to a new topic in her next sentence: “Oh, I found someone else to be in love with. His name is Jeff, but he’s only gonna be here a few more days.”
Sheila apologized that she wasn’t able to flesh out all the details of her adventures in this particular letter. To do that, she explained, “I’d have to write a book. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m old and lonely, but now I’m young and happy, so I’ll just write a chapter.”
When Jenny came upon Sheila’s letter in her closet, those last sentences jumped out at her because, of course, Sheila never got to live the full book. She was the Ames girl who never became a woman. When her friends think of her and speak of her, she’s always age seven or fifteen or nineteen—never more than twenty-two, the age she was when she died mysteriously. In their minds, she remains the carefree, boy-crazy teen they were.
“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,
At the reunion, the other girls pass around the photo, laughing about Jenny’s oversized corsage and Dan’s oversized bow tie. They peek underneath to get a look at Jenny’s actual date in his gray suit. And they think about sweet, scheming Sheila with those scissors in her hand.
All the girls wish Sheila was here with them. It would be so fantastic to hear her recollections of how she doctored that photo. They’d have so much to ask her: What would she remember about the early years of their friendship that the rest of them don’t? What would be her take on all of their middle-aged issues?
“Remember how she laughed?” asks Cathy. “It was so great. It was never a put-on, either. When she found something funny, I mean, her laugh was just unaudited.”
The girls remember her childhood smile, too. “Sheila always smiled like she had a secret,” says Jenny.
Angela and Sheila
In their heads, all the girls hold on to an image of Sheila, smiling away. The old photos help. But that laugh of hers, that’s harder to summon up, and they long to hear it again. It’s funny, they say, what you miss most about a person.
I n the summer of 1979, Jenny and Karla went on vacation together to California, and Sheila sent them a letter. Almost all of it was devoted to bringing them up-to-date on her boy situation back in Iowa.
First, Sheila wrote, she went for a drive with their classmate Darwin, and though she was really excited to be with him, “we said absolutely nothing to each other.” Later she went to Doug’s house with Sally, Cathy and Angela. Darwin was there. “He was being weird and so was I (I was nervous),” so that ended up without much conversation, too. The next day, she talked to “Beeb, Joe and Wally,” a three-some whom she described, in order and very precisely, as “new, not cute, and sweet.”
The next night, Sheila went to a disco where she “tried to get rid of Steve.” Once he was out of the way, she danced with Joe, Dave, Randy and then Charlie. It was a fun night at the disco until one of the guys “got pissed at another guy”—over a girl, of course—and started pounding his fists into a wall until they were bleeding. “It was terrible,” Sheila wrote, before jumping to a new topic in her next sentence: “Oh, I found someone else to be in love with. His name is Jeff, but he’s only gonna be here a few more days.”
Sheila apologized that she wasn’t able to flesh out all the details of her adventures in this particular letter. To do that, she explained, “I’d have to write a book. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m old and lonely, but now I’m young and happy, so I’ll just write a chapter.”
When Jenny came upon Sheila’s letter in her closet, those last sentences jumped out at her because, of course, Sheila never got to live the full book. She was the Ames girl who never became a woman. When her friends think of her and speak of her, she’s always age seven or fifteen or nineteen—never more than twenty-two, the age she was when she died mysteriously. In their minds, she remains the carefree, boy-crazy teen they were.
“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,
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