Kate and Tully’s first meeting in 1974 is remembered as the moment two lonely girls reached toward each other and began a friendship that would shape both their lives. Recounted years later through Kate’s memories and her account to Marah, the encounter joins a childhood wound to the bond that grew from it: Kate had known the pain of being left out, and with Tully she found a friend who understood that loneliness.

The loneliness before they met

Kate tells Marah that in fifth grade she had two best friends and that the three girls did everything together: they showed horses at the fair, held slumber parties, and spent summer days at the lake. Their grandmother called them the three horseketeers. Then, one summer when Kate was almost fourteen, the other girls stopped liking her. They began spending time with boys and going to parties, stopped calling, and left Kate to sit alone on the bus and eat lunch alone at school. She cried herself to sleep each night, still unable to explain why the friendship had ended.

The memory matters because Kate does not describe loneliness as an abstract childhood fear. She recalls its repeated daily shape: the solitary bus ride, lunch by herself, and tears at bedtime. When she tells Marah how much the rejection hurt, she makes clear that the experience remained vivid long after the girls who left her had disappeared from her life.

Finding Tully

In Kate’s recollection, the day after that first heartbreak she got up and went to school. Tully was waiting at the bus stop. Kate thought Tully was the coolest-looking girl she had ever seen and assumed someone so striking would never want to be friends with her. The expectation of rejection makes the encounter a reversal: the girl Kate initially believes is beyond her reach proves to be lonely and frightened too.

Kate tells Marah that she discovered this kinship inside Tully, where it counted. They became best friends that year—friends who did not deliberately hurt each other’s feelings or suddenly stop liking one another without explanation. The friendship offered a sharp contrast with Kate’s earlier experience: instead of being left to wonder what she had done wrong, she found a companion whose vulnerability made genuine mutual understanding possible.

A beginning recalled across generations

Years later, Tully looks back on the summer of 1974 while approaching Kate’s home. Flowers and scattered toys and bicycles bring the old Firefly Lane days to mind; their bikes had seemed like magic carpets carrying the girls into another world. Tully recognizes that meeting Kate changed her life because both girls had dared to reach out and say they wanted to be friends. The remembered beginning is therefore not simply a chance encounter: its significance lies in the risk of making the first approach and in the life-long consequences of that choice.

Kate’s story to Marah carries the memory forward into another mother-daughter conversation about friendship and rejection. By telling her daughter about the girls who abandoned her, and then about finding Tully, Kate gives Marah a personal account of how painful exclusion can be and how companionship can answer it. The first meeting is framed retrospectively, through the history it made possible: a friendship strong enough for both women to remember its beginning as a turning point in their lives.