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on her splendid hair.
    Everyone seemed to have a crush on her, including the baker. He delivered our bread every morning, running from door to door in high-cut shorts that showed off his tanned, muscular thighs. He sped up and down the street as if trying to make a pressing deadline, but if Darleen came to the door, he lingered, rummaging among the loaves in his deep wicker basket to find the perfect one to present to her. One morning, as she paid him, one of her just-glued false eyelashes fell off and drifted gently into his basket, lost among the whole wheats and the crusty whites. The two of them knelt there in the doorway and riffled through the neighborhood’s bread supply until they found it, at rest on a raisin bun.
    I bathed in Darleen’s reflected glitter when I could, stewed in childish envy when I couldn’t. Then, gradually, she began to take an interest in me, perceiving needs that our parents missed. She made sure I got a bra before it became a schoolyard issue. She took me shopping for my first non-little-girl outfit: navy culottes with a ribbed sweater. And then, in January 1966, she brought me my first pen pal.
    Darleen came home one night from her job in the Telegraph newspaper’s circulation department with the news that her coworker was Theodora—the columnist Ross Campbell’s eldest daughter, whose real name was Sally. Little Nell’s real name,Darleen told me, was Laura. “Sally says her dad just picked the ugliest names he could think of to call his kids in the column.”
    Soon, Sally came to visit. She was as dazzling as Darleen, but in a wild, bohemian style, with huge looped earrings and tangles of untamed flame-red hair. I yearned for a fascinating friend like Sally—somebody different, who didn’t live in a house just like ours and go to the same school and same church every Sunday. I thought about Nell, or Laura: how exciting to have an assumed name, an alias, a nom de guerre , or de plume , or de something. That was the kind of person I wished I could meet.
    From my bedroom, I could hear Sally and Darleen laughing together over things too sophisticated for me to understand. Instead of getting on with my homework, I doodled in the margins of my notebook, over and over again, in different handwriting:
    Nell/Laura
    Nell=Laura
    Nell Nell Nell.
    My father was always writing songs and poems for people he admired—Einstein, Churchill. I decided to write one for Laura Campbell:
Now I know your name’s not Nell
It doesn’t seem the same .
But I still like you anyway ,
I know you’re not to blame .
    When my father came in to say good night, I showed it to him. He laughed. “Why don’t you send it to her?” He’d written fan letters to Ross Campbell over the years, and always received charming replies. In the morning, before I had a chance tochange my mind, I asked Darleen for the Campbells’ address and put the letter in the mail.
    The reply lay in the yellow mailbox, buried under the bills and the supermarket fliers.
    I put my school bag down on the hot concrete pathway and slit the envelope, and in that moment I found the opening I’d looked for to the wider world.
    “I had a brainwave the other day, thinking you might like to be my pen-friend.”
    I held the letter as if the offer it contained was an admission to Harvard. “Actually,” she wrote, “my name’s not even Laura, it’s Sonny.”
    I was enthralled. I wrote back immediately, trying hard to sound like someone worthy of a pen pal with three names.
    Sonny wrote that she had another pen pal, a girl in Manchester, England. But that correspondent was about to be jettisoned. She had earned Sonny’s disgust by expressing surprise that an Australian knew who the Rolling Stones were. “What does she think we are, kangaroos?” A Sydney pen pal mightn’t be as exotic as an English one, but at least I wouldn’t make gaffes like that. And the stamps would be cheaper.
    Sonny lived just across town—ten miles as the crow flies.