In the late 1980s, Sana al Solami was a dusty-kneed tomboy who knew every hideout in our sleepy, sun-baked compound on the eastern Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia.

We were about 10 years old, and both our fathers taught at a petroleum university in the oil-rich town of Dhahran. Our mothers were best friends who blamed us when our little brothers nearly strangled themselves during an ill-fated Superman reenactment that involved jumping from a bunk bed wearing sheets as capes.

Sana was the oldest child and only daughter in a Saudi family, and I was the oldest child and, at the time, the only girl in an Egyptian-American family. We were partners in crime, restless little girls with no patience for dolls or tea parties. Instead, we turned empty villas into secret clubhouses, discovered the best roller-skating routes on the compound and made meals of the honeysuckle that grew wild outside Sana’s home.

I filled journals and dreamed of becoming a writer. She wanted to be a doctor, maybe a pediatrician, even though we didn’t know a single Saudi woman in medicine.

In the 15 years since my family last visited Dhahran, I’ve often wondered what became of the Saudi girl who taught me which desert snakes were poisonous and which could be wrapped around your finger like a slithery ring. I just got back from a reporting assignment in Saudi Arabia, where I found the kingdom’s changes reflected in the life of my old friend.

I took a taxi to Sana’s home one warm day last month and almost burst into tears at the sight of the honeysuckle tangles that still framed her family’s home. A glamorous creature answered the door – big black eyes, red spaghetti-strap top, snug designer jeans, kitten-heeled sandals.

This was not Sana, the tomboy of 15 years ago. This was Sana, the doctor who specializes in cancer diagnoses. Her mandatory black veil hung on a peg next to her white lab coat in a bedroom piled with thick medical textbooks and stuffed animals.

“Want to go for a drive?” she asked with a grin, her trademark dimples deep as ever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t mean they don’t. Intrepid Bedouin women drive supply trucks in the remote and unforgiving desert, while some wealthy Saudi women slip into neighboring Bahrain to take spins in the luxury cars they keep there for weekend use. And then there are women like Sana who live in the rarefied world of expatriate compounds, where Saudi law basically ends at the gates.

Sana draped herself in the traditional black robe called an abaya, strapped on a full facial veil and grabbed the keys to her brother’s silver Lexus. Her mother, Aziza, climbed into the back, alternately disparaging her daughter’s driving and praying we didn’t crash.

Fifteen years disappeared and we were 10 and giggly again. In all those intervening years, she’d traipsed through Europe, obtained a medical degree and begun a job at a prestigious local hospital. Instead of playing with the flora and fauna of the desert, on this trip we talked about all the new shopping malls and laughed at how the morality police ban the sale of red roses on Valentine’s Day. (Sana said everyone just buys the flowers and heart-shaped balloons a couple days in advance. Ah, simple subversion.)

We kicked our heels high on the swing set at our favorite playground and drove past the building where we used to watch “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan” and other movies until authorities closed down the screening room in accordance with Saudi Arabia’s ban on cinemas.

She wanted to introduce me to a friend who was with her children at another playground on the compound, but when we arrived we found an indiscernible jumble of black-clad women on a bench. Sana was in a veil and her friend was in a veil, so Sana dialed the woman’s number and waited to hear which black robe chirped with a cell-phone ringtone.

“There you are!” Sana exclaimed to a pair of eyes, all we could see of her friend.

While dramatic improvements to the status of Saudi women mean they can, like Sana, become doctors and engineers now, a wave of religious extremism has tightened social restrictions and made the facial veil, called niqab, ubiquitous. When her mother wasn’t listening, Sana explained how Saudi youths get around the social taboos: by using Bluetooth technology to connect via cell phone in shopping malls, by joining online matchmaking services, by cruising the “family sections” of omnipresent Starbucks cafes.

Sana zipped along the familiar streets, slowing down so I could snap a photo of the tall white minaret of the compound’s aging mosque. Apart from a couple new housing complexes, there were few overt changes to our old world.

Sana explained that the real differences lay below the surface. She drove to the back boundary of the compound and pointed out a tall fence topped with barbed wire that separates the university enclave from the adjacent compound of Saudi ARAMCO, the oil giant where hundreds of Americans and other Westerners work.

“They put this up after Sept. 11,” she said.

We ducked into what everybody called the co-op, the compound’s general store, where we used to blow our allowances on soft drinks and candy. Remember that nice Egyptian guy behind the counter, she asked me, the really friendly one? I did. He disappeared one day, she whispered. The police had nabbed him for alleged drug trafficking, an offense punishable by public beheading.

Sana drove back to her house and, later that night, another one of our childhood friends stopped by to complete the reunion. I won’t disclose her name, but she’s a psychiatrist now – a path she pursued despite a deep-rooted resistance to public discussion of mental illness.

The psychiatrist spends many of her nights on call for the growing number of methamphetamine addicts in the eastern province. Sometimes, she said, she treats entire families hooked on the latest drug to relieve the kingdom’s monotony. While I was in town, a local newspaper reported that the government had banned the sale of some over-the-counter cold medicine, a key ingredient to cooking meth.

Like mental-health workers everywhere, my friend sees some heartbreaking cases, such as the young bride who showed up with her body crisscrossed with marks from a clothes hanger. Her husband had unleashed his fury after she fiddled with his laptop to find out the names of girls she suspected him of chatting with online.

“I asked her what she thought the problem was, and she said it was that her husband was cheating on her,” the psychiatrist said with an exasperated sigh. “No, I told her, the problem is he beat you!”

I confessed to my Saudi friends that I had expected to find them both married, with a passel of children and living in air-conditioned boredom. They rolled their eyes and chided me for buying into the stereotype. Both of them are professionals in their late 20s, unmarried and, like me, eager to see as much of the world as they could before settling down.

True, their fathers probably are more open-minded than many Saudi dads. Paternal permission is required for Saudi women to travel alone; both carry their requisite letters with pride. Their fathers trust them and, besides, women here know instinctively how far they can push the limits.

Yes, my old friends assured me, things were looking up for Saudi women, for Saudi society in general. But that was boring political talk. Sana steered the conversation to more lighthearted matters. She flipped open a laptop to show off the uncensored American movies her brother had downloaded with torrent software.

“So,” Sana asked, a flash of the tomboyish imp returning, “Did you see Borat?”