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wanted to see. “Give us a smile!” the hair-netted ladies at Knudsen’s Danish Bakery would say when Bethie came in with her mother to buy an almond tea ring, and they’d give Bethie a sprinkle cookie when she obliged.
    “Here comes a pretty little miss,” Stan Danovich, who owned Stan’s Meats on 11 Mile Road, would say, and he’d fold up a slice of turkey or bologna for Bethie to eat. Mr. Tartaglia at the five-and-dime would put extra peppermints in her bag, and Iris, who came to clean three times a week, called her Miss America and brought clip-on earrings for Bethie to wear until it was time for her to go home.
    Bethie is a kind and conscientious student with many friends , Miss Keyes wrote on her fourth-grade report card, in her beautiful, flowing blue script. Bethie is a gifted musician who sings in tune , Mrs. Lambert, her music teacher, said. By fifth grade, two boys had kissed her in the cloakroom, and a third had carried her books home for a week, and she’d gotten the solo in the winter concert, where she had sung a whole verse of “Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland” by herself.
    Bethie loved being a girl. She loved skirts that flared out when she twirled; she loved the look of her clean white socks against her black and white saddle shoes. She loved the charm bracelet she’d gotten for her birthday. She only had two charms so far, a tiny Eiffel tower and a little Scottie dog, but she hoped to get more for Chanukah.
    Bethie was pretty, Bethie was popular, and so it was only natural that when, at Hebrew school, the sign-up sheet for auditions for the spring Purimspiel was posted, Bethie put her name down for the role of Queen Esther, the biggest girl’s part in the production.
    The Hebrew school students performed the play each year. Bethie knew the story by heart: Once upon a time in the kingdom of Shushan, a not-very-smart king put his disobedient wife aside and found himself in need of a replacement. He held a beauty pageant to find the prettiest girl in all the land, so that he could marry her. (“Isn’t that kind of superficial?” Jo had asked, and Sarah had said, “It was how they did things back then.”) The winner was a girl named Esther, and her big secret was that she was Jewish, only the king didn’t know. After Esther became the queen she overheard Haman, the king’s wicked advisor, telling the king that he should kill all the Jews. Only then did Esther reveal herself, and because the king loved her, he let the Jews live, and killed Haman instead.
    There were lots of parts for boys in the show—the silly king, whose name, Ahasuerus, sounded like a sneeze, and Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, who urged Esther to enter the pageant and then, after she was married, to tell the king the truth, and Haman, the bad guy, who was always played by a boy with a black-eyeliner mustache. Every time Haman’s name was spoken, the audiencewas supposed to hiss or boo, or stamp their feet, or shake their groggers , which were homemade noisemakers, paper plates filled with dried lentil beans, folded over and stapled shut.
    All of the girls wanted to be Queen Esther, but for two years in a row, the role had gone to Cheryl Goldfarb, who was in sixth grade and whose father was a lawyer. Cheryl lived in an enormous house in Sherwood Forest, where some of the wealthiest Jewish families in Detroit lived. Bethie had never been to Cheryl’s house, but her friend Barbara Simoneaux had, and Barbara said that Cheryl had a queen-sized bed with a pink coverlet and a stuffed pink bear that was almost as big as she was. Cheryl took dance lessons twice a week at Miss Vicki’s Academy of Dance on Woodward Avenue (Bethie had begged her mother to let her take tap or ballet, and Sarah had sighed and smoothed Bethie’s hair and said maybe next year). Cheryl had a white rabbit-fur coat that came with a matching muff, and every time she passed it in the coatroom Bethie would give it a quick stroke, thinking it was so much