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  I walked a few yards along the sidewalk until I reached the spot that I recalled as the school bus stop.

  I looked at the two houses, my own and the one that, once upon a time, had been a different building entirely. The sun was high and bright, just as it was all those years ago when I’d stood here filled with terror at the prospect of my first day at the new school; just as it was when I heard the door across the street slam and saw the big blonde girl in T-shirt and blue jeans come careening pell-mell across the way to catch the bus. The sun was high and bright that day, that first day when I learned that the girl’s name was Lucy Sparrow, two months before she was murdered.

  —Two—

  IT WAS MARCH. I stood in my pink cardigan and powder-blue skirt, clutching my lunch bag tightly before me in both hands and trying not to tremble. Hardly more than a week before I’d been home in Fresno, where everything was as usual; then the rain, the darkness, the eerie bus ride into the netherworld, where I was cut off from anything I’d ever known, everything I was.

  Why do I have to go, Dad?

  Mom, what did I do?

  I had no memory of Uncle Frank or Aunt Louise, though in helping me board my mother had assured me I would remember these people as soon as I saw them. “You knew them when you were little, honey,” she said, which might have been the case, but I certainly didn’t recognize them when I got there. I wasn’t even clear how either of them was related to my parents.

  That bus ride: a nightmarish succession of headlights slashing by in the rain, the blackness of open country followed by a small town’s gleaming lights which shone meltingly through the wet windows. It seemed endless, terrifying, though I was even more fearful of what would happen when it ended. Where would I be? How would I live? Would I ever find my way home?

  These events had only just happened when I found myself standing one morning where I’d been told to stand to wait for the bus, holding desperately to my lunch bag as if it were a life preserver in the midst of tempest-tossed seas. I held myself rigidly still, thinking, School, school, it’s time to go to school, I must go to school, trying to forget that I was a stranger among strangers, that I had no idea where I was or why. What was Quiet, California to me? I couldn’t have found it on a map to save my soul. And yet school—yes!—school would make me normal again, give me an identity, it would make me a person, so unlike what I was now, which was nothing.

  Just as the bus came rumbling up the street I heard the door across the way burst open and then immediately slam shut again. A girl about my age came charging into the road toward me, running recklessly in front of the bus as it braked to a stop. She wore a dirty black T-shirt emblazoned with the words Bachman-Turner Overdrive along with tattered blue jeans and sneakers. There was a backpack slung sloppily over her shoulder.

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly, without looking at me. She was taller than I, bigger, with blonde hair that looked like it hadn’t been brushed that morning, perhaps for several mornings. As the bus door swung open she said, “You new here?”

  I nodded wordlessly.

  “Hm.” She looked me up and down dubiously, clearly finding fault with my cardigan and skirt. As she turned to mount the bus steps I heard the harsh voice of the driver instructing her to never run in front of the bus. “Aw, c’mon, Mr. Cox,” she said, stepping up into the vehicle, “you were stopping anyway, right? I knew you weren’t gonna run me over.” I followed her up the steps.

  “Young lady,” he said—I could see now that Mr. Cox was a burly, graying man with pockmarked skin—“I have to tell your mother if you keep doing it. Stop it, now.”

  To my surprise she turned back to me suddenly and whispered, “You gotta love a guy named Cox,” then giggled and moved down the aisle.

  The bus was mercifully empty, or nearly so. I dropped myself into the seat behind the girl’s and wondered how long the ride would be. As the bus pulled out, she again looked at me. She said, in conspiratorially low tones: “Guess what his first name is.”

  “Whose?”

  “The bus driver’s, stupid.”

  I shrugged, shook my head.

  She grinned. “It’s Dick,” she said. “Can you believe that? The bus driver’s name is Dick Cox.” She laughed, a big, throaty laugh not unlike a bark. I smiled again, politely, unaware of why all this was so humorous. She scowled at me suddenly. “You get it,” she said, “don’t you?”

  I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. “Sure. I get it.”

  “Then why aren’t you laughing?”

  “I just don’t think it’s that funny.”

  She looked suspicious. “Okay, then, what’s the joke?”

  “The joke?”

  “Dick Cox. What’s the joke with that name?”

  “I—” I looked down, fidgeted with my lunch bag. “It—it sounds funny.”

  I could feel this big blonde girl, heavyset, not pretty, studying me.

  “‘It sounds funny,’” she repeated.

  I stayed silent, hoping something would distract her attention. Please leave me alone, I wanted to say. Just leave me alone.

  “It’s because they’re both names for a boy’s private parts,” she said finally, taking pity on me. “Dick? Cox? Get it?”

  I didn’t respond. I was twisting the edge of my cardigan in my fingers, unable to stop.

  “I don’t like that sweater,” she said, eying me critically. “It’s too girlie. Anyway, what are you wearing a sweater for? It’s not cold.”

  “I—get cold a lot,” I said meekly, which was the truth.

  “Yeah? I don’t get cold at all, hardly. Why do you wear your hair in bangs like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kinda nerdy.”

  I stared out the bus window. We were heading across the bridge that separated the housing tract from the downtown. It was a long drop from the bridge to the riverbed below, I saw, long enough to kill a person if they wanted to jump.

  “What’s your name?” the girl demanded.

  “Frances.”

  “What?”

  “Frances,” I said, louder this time. “Frances Pastan.”

  “Frances.” She considered it. “Fran.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody calls me Fran.”

  “Well, they should. Like Fran Tarkington. He’s a football player. You heard of him?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Well, you should’ve,” she said. “He’s a quarterback. Minnesota Vikings.”

  I nodded.

  “Lucy,” she said finally.

  “What?”

  “Lucy, stupid. My name. Lucy. Lucy Sparrow.”

  “Oh.” I nodded again.

  “You just moved in, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the Cartmills your parents?”

  The bus was pulling up to a sidewalk where a large group of children was waiting, at least a dozen of them.

  “I said,” she repeated, looking at me in annoyance, “are the Cartmills your parents?”

  I twisted the cardigan, twisted it, twisted it. “No,” I whispered. At last I looked at her. “Would you—would you please not talk to me?”

  She stared at me as the bus filled with noisy girls and boys. I noticed her unusual eyes, gray with a hint of silver; her flat nose, her thin, rather chapped lips. She had a birthmark, I saw, a narrow brown line running from the corner of her jaw down to the mid-point of her neck.

  “Crap,” she said, as the bus began to move again, “are you crying?”

  I suddenly realized that I was. Shame-faced, I wiped my eyes with my palms.

  I’d feared she would laugh at me for my tears, but to my surprise she didn’t. Instead she studied me closely.

  “Not your parents, huh?” she said thoughtfully.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, crap,” she said. “That sucks.”

  We had the same homeroom together, as well as most of our classes, but Lucy and I didn’t speak again until lunchtime. In the m
eanwhile I sat in the back of each classroom, eyes firmly on my desk, saying nothing to anyone. Books were issued to me and placed in my hands; I only opened them if the teacher instructed the class to do so. Although Quiet itself was so small as to be practically nonexistent, Soames Elementary School took in students from several neighboring towns, so there were fifteen or twenty students in each class. After a simple greeting from each teacher at the beginning of the period I was, for the most part, blessedly ignored. Many of us traveled together from classroom to classroom—I could feel the eyes of the other girls analyzing, evaluating me; and already I could sense that I was coming up short to the ones who really mattered, the girls I was able to identify before we were even done with first period. Melissa Deaver, Susan Roselli, Miriam Doyle. The pretty ones, the popular ones without whose approval no girl would ever be really important in the school. I must have seemed hopeless to them, drab as I was, shy and silent; at morning recess, during which I sat alone under a tree, I saw them across the playground studying me, their lovely but cruel faces huddled together. At last one of them—it was Miriam Doyle, all sleek black hair and premature bust—made her way over to me, clearly an emissary sent to test the waters. She said hi, introduced herself, asked me a few questions about who I was, where I was from. My answers were monosyllabic; I made no eye contact. After two or three minutes of this torture—and it was torture for both of us, I’m sure, not just me—Miriam smiled, said, “Okay, ’bye,” and skipped back over to her friends.

  When the bell rang and we shuffled toward class again I heard her in front of me, giggling to Melissa and Susan: the phrase total zombie floated through the air to my ears, and I knew that I’d failed their test, the only one that counted. We weren’t even through morning classes yet, and my place in the pecking order had already been invincibly determined.

  Lunch, however, was a different story. I sat with my brown bag on the grass not far from the school building, next to the little kids’ playground: designed for the smaller children, from whom we were segregated (they took their lunch before us), it contained a swing set, sandbox, a jungle gym. The older kids never used this equipment; it was considered beneath their dignity. Instead the boys hustled about with their footballs and basketballs while the girls lounged around under the trees or hit tennis balls at each other on the school courts, this being the era of the tennis craze spawned by Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert.

  Yet on the little kids’ playground there was one girl who was pounding a tetherball with great energy. She hit it with enormous power, sending the ball in wild circles and then smashing it again in the other direction, grunting each time, her hair flying in the breeze. It was the girl from the bus. Lucy.

  Eventually she noticed me. “Hey,” she said.

  I clutched at my lunch bag, looked away.

  “Aren’t you gonna eat?” she called to me, pounding at the tetherball again.

  I glanced down at the bag, trying to think of a response. I didn’t know what was in the bag—Aunt Louise had packed it and shoved it into my hands that morning—and I found myself afraid to open it. Whatever it was, disgusting or delicious, it would be different from what Alba, our maid, had habitually prepared, and I felt somehow that I’d had enough difference for one day, that if one more different thing happened to me I might shatter into pieces.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said finally.

  “Not hungry?” She let the ball go and came near me, looming over me, blotting out the sun. “What do you mean, you’re not hungry?”

  “I’m just—not.” I held it out to her. “Do you want it?”

  She eyed the bag appraisingly. “Well, maybe,” she said. “What’ve you got?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She scowled and dropped down next to me. “Here, let’s see it.” Taking the bag, she opened it, peered inside, and began pulling things from it. “Sandwich…peanut butter. Little thing of orange juice. Apple…Hey, there’s some cookies in here!” She pulled them out: two Oreos in a clear plastic sack.

  “Now, c’mon,” she said. “I know you want these. Anybody who doesn’t like Oreos is a crazy person. You’re not a crazy person, are you?” She held out a cookie to me.

  Actually, I wasn’t—Oreos were something that Alba might have packed, so I took the cookie. “Thanks,” I said, biting down.

  “Hey, it’s your lunch. Do you mind if I have the other one?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes. I mean, go ahead.”

  We sat there in the sunshine. I watched her work on her Oreo, pulling it apart and scraping away the white filling with her teeth before munching on the dark cookie halves. Then she bit into the apple.

  “First day can be hard,” she said, chewing.

  I didn’t respond.

  “I’ve only been here since the start of the year,” she said. “So I was the new kid in September. This school isn’t too bad, I guess. But there are some bitches here you should stay away from.” She pointed across the green lawn to the place where Melissa, Susan, and Miriam were huddled together, giggling. “Hey,” she said, jumping up, “you want to play tetherball?”

  I looked away, shook my head.

  “Aw, come on,” she insisted, leaning down and grabbing my arm. “It’ll be fun.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  She stood again, looked at me. “Well, okay. Thanks for the lunch.”

  She moved off to the tetherball pole again, took the ball in her left hand and then whacked at it with her right. The ball spun. I watched this loud, blowsy girl focus her entire attention on the tetherball, as if her life depended on giving it a solid smash every single time. Glancing across the grass I saw Melissa, Susan, and Miriam pointing and laughing openly now—laughing at her. I couldn’t hear their words but I could imagine them easily enough: What a pig, can you believe she plays on the little kids’ playground, she’s so gross! They themselves were pretty, all three of them. Melissa was a twelve-year-old version of a California beach blonde, with blue eyes and perky upturned nose. Susan was a dark-featured Italian bombshell. Miriam, the plainest of the three, made up for her lack of facial beauty with a sensationally curvaceous body years ahead of its time. All their clothes were immaculate, fresh clean jeans and skirts with tops that fit them as if they’d been custom tailored. Their hair was meticulously groomed and held with fancy ribbons and barrettes. They wore shiny bracelets and rings.

  Lucy Sparrow had none of these things. She was a large-framed kid who was well on her way to being fat. Her cheeks were spotted with freckles. Her clothes were old, torn, and as she swung at the tetherball I could see the dark stains under her arms. When she’d been sitting next to me I could smell her—a sweat odor, a girl-smell no doubt offensive to the delicate ethereal creatures across the lawn. Suddenly, in a rush of hot anger, I hated them. I pictured myself marching across the lawn and kicking their faces in, slapping at them, dragging them by their precious hair and smashing their heads against the school’s wall.

  Instead I picked up the remnants of my lunch and threw them in the trash bin. Then I walked hesitantly toward Lucy.

  She seemed unsurprised. “Here,” she said, sending the ball practically into orbit. “Get this one.”

  I was a hopeless maladroit, however, and in my first attempt I completely missed; I swung at nothing but air. I heard the girls laugh.

  Suddenly Lucy grabbed the ball, glancing at them but then looking steadily at me. “You’re off balance,” she said, “and you’re not keeping your eye on it. Look.” She stood with her legs apart, bounced a bit this way and that. “See, you can keep your balance this way. And look at the ball. You’ll hit it if you don’t take your eye off it. Here, try.”

  She lofted the ball gently at me. I swung, and to my surprise I hit it—poorly, but I hit it. The ball skittered off in the wrong direction.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Try again. And plant your feet the way I showed you. Like this. Yeah, that’s good. But you gotta close your
fist, like this, see? Otherwise you’re just slapping at it. Here, try again.” She tossed the ball at me and I swung, making solid contact. “Hey, yeah, that’s it,” she said, tracking the flight of the ball and then capturing it again. “Here, let’s practice.”

  And for the next several minutes she coached me, my aim and swing quickly improving. At last we began playing together, she socking it hard—though not nearly as hard as she’d been doing before—and I sending it back the other way as best I could. When the bell rang for afternoon classes I realized to my shock that I had actually been having fun.

  “What’s your next class?” Lucy asked, as we gave the ball a few more punches.

  “I think it’s…Social Studies?” I said, swinging.

  “We’re together, then. Mr. Lowther. He’s pretty cool. He tells good stories. I like him better than his wife. She teaches Science.”

  I hardly heard what she was saying, however, after the words We’re together, then. I realized that we had all but one morning class together, too. I was suddenly thrilled.

  We talked of teachers and classes while banging at the tetherball, hardly noticing that most of the other students had disappeared from the playground. Finally Mrs. Petrie’s voice broke in from across the lawn, calling, “Lucy! Frances! Time for class!” and we looked at each other, laughing for no particular reason.

  I started to turn toward the school, but Lucy said, “Wait a sec,” and grabbed the ball again. She made a determined face, breathed hard for effect, and as she struck powerfully at the ball she grunted, “That’s for Melissa-the-Bitch Deaver!” She grabbed the ball as it came around, socked it again: “And that’s for Susan-the-Bitch Roselli!” A final time: “And that’s for Miriam-the-Bitch Doyle!” Watching the tetherball swing wildly around the pole, I was giddy with excitement and a sense of mischief, danger.