Maddy’s mother licked her lips once, twice, removing some of the pink and most of the gloss, and finally said: “Very well.” Later she told everyone Ronnie had lied to her, that she never would have let two little girls leave if she had known they were going to be unsupervised, if she had known they were going to cross Edmondson Avenue alone. That was the worst thing anyone in Southwest Baltimore could imagine at 2 P.M., on July 17, seven years ago-crossing Edmondson Avenue alone.

The hill to Edmondson was long and gradual. Alice did not know if there were really ten hills in this neighborhood called Ten Hills, but there were enough slopes to punish short legs. The two girls did not have cover-ups, so they knotted their towels high on their bodies, at the spot where breasts were supposed to hold them. But they had no breasts, only puffy bumps, which they had started keeping in bras just this year. So the towels kept slipping to the ground, tangling at their ankles. Ronnie’s was a plain, no-longer-white bath towel, and she cursed it every time it fell until finally, after tripping over it for the fourth time, she slung it around her neck, not caring if people saw her body. Alice could never walk down the street like that, and she wore a one-piece. Ronnie had a red-and-white bikini, yet she was so thin that the skimpy bottoms seemed to bag on her. The only curve on Ronnie’s body was her stomach, which bowed out slightly. “Like a Biafran baby,” Alice ’s mother, Helen, had said. “Oops-I’m dating myself.” Alice had no idea what she was talking about, whether it was good or bad, or even how someone went about dating herself. She just knew that her mother never said Alice looked like a Biafran baby.

Alice ’s navy one-piece had a cutout of a daisy on her belly. Ronnie told her this was queer, and had said this every time she saw Alice in the suit this summer, which was exactly three times-a day-trip to Sandy Point, another poolside birthday party, and today. “Who wants to see a brown daisy on your fat white belly?” she had said when Alice ’s mom dropped her this morning at the Fullers’ house before going to work.