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on a floating platter. At night they catch lightning bugs and dig the lightning part out with their nails while the bugs are still alive, smudging the still-glowing paste into rings around their fingers. Once they spent most of the afternoon singing a song they had made up, to the tune of
The Bridge Over the River Quai
, at the top of their lungs:
    Herman, look what you’ve done to me!

Herman, I think it’s pregnancy
.
Herman, you put your sperm in

And now it’s Herman, and Sherman, and me
.
    (Later Mem will remember this song with guilty satisfaction. Two of the girls in this group will become pregnant while they are still in high school. As a young teen Mem will watch them, both several pounds heavier, separately walking their babies around the neighborhood in strollers. Neither of the girls will glow anymore. They won’t talk to each other. They certainly won’t sing.)
    Watching this strange bouquet of girls come closer, Mem envisions herself walking down the street with them, laughing their secret laugh, wrapped in pink tatters and floating over the blacktop with roller-skate feet. But when they notice Mem watching, the group stops twittering and hollering to each other, and Mem drops her stare, looking instead at her feet until the girls stop right in front of her. They are so close that when she looks back up she can see the milky grain of their skin and smell their smells: bubblegum, hairspray, nearly grown-up perspiration.
    The tall one smiles at Mem, showing all her teeth. Her cheeks are sunrise pink and smooth as a goblet. Her eyes don’t flinch when the sun flashes in them.
    “Hello!” she says brightly. “What’s your name?”
    Mem doesn’t answer. She has never been asked this before and doesnot know what to say.
    “Don’t be scared,” the tall girl purrs. “We just want to know your name.”
    “We’ve seen you around here,” says another. “You don’t go to school, right?”
    Mem shakes her head
no
.
    The tall girl juts out a hip, twirls a piece of golden hair between her fingers. “That’s cool. I wish I didn’t have to go to school. School sucks. It’s like, I don’t need to know this stuff. It’s
so
stupid. It’s
so
gross. You are
so
lucky.”
    Mem tries to smile.
Cool, sucks, gross
. She doesn’t know what any of these words mean. They sound like a secret code.
    “You look just like this doll I have,” says the big one. “She’s supposed to like cry after you give her a bottle and squeeze her belly but she doesn’t really like work anymore but that’s cool we don’t really play with dolls anymore do you have any dolls?”
    Mem shakes her head again. She isn’t allowed to play with dolls. And she isn’t allowed to tell these girls that she isn’t allowed to play with dolls. A hot flush opens across her forehead and burns its way down. Maybe this is a test. Maybe her mother is watching from the window, monitoring, making sure that Mem doesn’t say the wrong things. But she wants to talk. She wants to tell them how pretty she thinks they are, that they look like dolls, too. She pokes her toes into the grass.
    “So, do you want to be our friend?” asks the tall girl, and Mem
nods yes
.
    “What’s your name?” asks the girl.
    Mem has no idea what to say. Before she can answer, the small girl starts to laugh. She smiles gently at Mem, asking in a kind voice, “Are you a
retard?”
    “My name is Mirabelle,” Mem answers quickly, and even as she says it she knows it sounds like a lie. Behind her the spigot hisses.
    “Oh,” says the tall one.
“Mirabelle.”
    She cocks her pretty head to the side and smiles so hard her gums show.
    “Well, Mirabelle,” she says, “you smell. Do you know that?”
    “She does, she smells,” says the tall girl to the rest, who nod seriouslyin agreement. “It’s her ugly, pukey, gypsy feet that smell. I guess she doesn’t know how to shower.”
    As the girls walk around Mem like creatures picking over carrion, Mem looks down at