Edie Jerundt had brought along a handful of recent downloads, and the two girls settled down immediately in front of the video panel. Connie stayed a quarter of an hour, making nervous conversation about the lengthy security shutdown and how inconvenient it was proving — she had hoped to make a trip into Constance for some early Christmas shopping — then excused herself and promised to stop by and pick up Edie before five.

Marguerite watched the two girls as they sat in the living room staring at the video panel.

The downloads were a bit babyish for Tess, Panda Girl adventures, and Edie had brought along those image-synched glasses that were supposed to be bad for your eyes if you wore for them for more than a few hours. Both girls flinched from the enhanced 3-D action sequences.

Apart from that they might have been alone. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, inclined at contrasting angles against plump pillows. Marguerite felt immediately and obscurely sorry for Edie Jerundt, one of those girls designed by nature to be picked on and ostracized, arms and legs awkward as stilts, her grasp approximate, her words halting, her embarrassment perpetual and profound.

It was nice, Marguerite reflected, that Tess had befriended a girl like Edie Jerundt.

Unless—

Unless it was Edie who had befriended Tess.

After the downloads the girls played with the dolls Tess had liberated from the garage. The dolls were a motley bunch, most collected by Tess at outdoor flea markets back when Ray used to make weekend drives from Crossbank into the New Hampshire countryside. Sun-paled fashion dolls with strangely twisted joints and mismatched clothes; oversized baby dolls, a majority of them naked; a scattering of action figures from forgotten movies, arms and legs frozen akimbo. Tess tried to enlist Edie in a scenario (this is the mother, this is the father; the baby is hungry but they have to go to work so this is the baby-sitter), but Edie quickly grew bored and was reduced to parading the dolls across the coffee table and giving them nonsense monologues (I’m a girl, I have a dog, I’m pretty, I hate you).