A few years ago John said that only the Midwestern Asian girls still wore high heels all the time. I didn’t care. I still loved dressing up: short skirts and stilettos in the summer, long slinky skirts or tight jeans with shorter heels for winter or going dancing.

Two summers ago we all decided we’d do karaoke one Friday night. What a nightmare!

Lisa was supposed to bring some music for the machine, and we ended up with a single Hanna Montana album playing over and over again all night. We gave up after three and a half hours. I heard that Lisa and some of her friends stayed until two in the morning. The guys said it turned into quite a show after about 12:30.

The funny thing is, they were all too drunk to remember any details! Serves them right for drinking that much.

Lisa and her friends didn’t hang out with us for a long time after that. Why would they? We were tired of their music, and they’d stolen a couple of our guys.

It’s not like anyone got pregnant – then you’d have to get married right away! No, it wasn’t like that. But it almost felt like that a few months after everyone started hanging out again, when Julie and Marc moved in together.

The elders didn’t like that; but what could they do to stop it? All the younger generation didn’t care, and here in the States they could only do so much about it.

It was so funny when Julie’s grandma started sending her gifts like she’d really gotten married, and even funnier when she started sending over chicken soup! I laughed so hard.

To her, Julie living with a man meant she might as well have been married, only, why wasn’t she getting pregnant? There must be something wrong with her. She would sit around with the other old ladies, complaining about how Julie would never get pregnant, eating all that American food! No, she’d fix that, oh, yes – good whole chicken soup, boiled down, nice proper vegetables simmered in, that would bring on some great-grandchildren.

When month after month it still didn’t work, Julie’s grandmother started muttering . . . things . . . under her breath whenever Marc walked in the room. I guess she thought if her chicken soup didn’t fix Julie, then maybe it wasn’t Julie’s fault at all. You could tell by the way she started to sniff the air around Marc that she was wondering if some evil American demon had done something to him - like you could smell it! - and that was why he couldn’t get his wife pregnant.

We didn’t stop laughing for weeks after Billy sat down and explained about condoms.

Julie’s grandmother thought they were evil.