The parking lot’s macadam shone black, reminding Alice of a bubbling, boiling sea in a fairy tale, of a landscape that could vaporize upon touch.

“It’s like the desert in Oz,” she said, thinking of the hand-me-down books rescued from her mother’s childhood.

“There’s no desert in Oz,” Ronnie said.

“Yes, there is, later, in the other books, there’s this desert that burns you up-”

“It’s not a book,” Ronnie said. “It’s a movie.”

Alice decided not to contradict her, although Ronnie usually ceded to Alice when it came to matters of books and facts and school. These were the things that Alice thought of as knowledge, a word that she saw in blazing blue letters, for it had stared at her all year from the bulletin board in their fifth-grade classroom. “A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increases strength.” The A papers of the week were posted beneath that proverb, and Alice had grieved, privately, any week she failed to make the board. Ronnie, who never made it, always said she didn’t care.

But Ronnie was in one of her dark moods today, long past the point where anyone could tell her anything.

“I should call your mothers,” Maddy’s mom had fretted, even as she banished them from the party, from the pool. “You shouldn’t cross Edmondson Avenue alone.”

“I’m allowed,” Ronnie said. “I have an aunt on Stamford, I go to her house when my parents are working. She’s this side of Edmondson.”

Then, with a defiant look around at the other girls, their faces still stricken and shocked, Ronnie added: “My aunt has Doublestuf Oreos and Rice Krispie treats and all the cable channels, and I can watch anything I want, even if it’s higher than PG- 13.”