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her feet, the dancing-feet-of-joy that had sent her spinning around the kitchen the night before. And then she sees that what they say is true. Her toes are small and dirty and shaped like grubs. They are horrible feet! Terrible feet, the skin white as salt cod. Mem can see the map of veins under the pallid flesh. She tries to cover one foot with the other, burying her toes into the dirt.
    The big one calls Mem
Crybaby
.
    “Make her cry,” says the one carrying the radio. “Go ahead. I bet she loves to cry.”
    Mem wishes her mother were here. Her mother would know what to do. She would say something funny and smart, something that would get their respect. Something that would make them want to be her friend.
    But Mem’s mother is not there.
    “Here,” Mem says as she bends over. She hands the big girl a clean, new apple, still damp and ruby red.
    They take the apples and smile, kindly. Real smiles
.
    They ask Mem to join their group
.
    “Mirabelle,” they say, “what a beautiful name.”
    But they only bare their teeth, like any animal saying to its prey,
You are food
.
    The tall one wrinkles her small nose at the apple in her hand and pretends to sniff it.
    “Did she touch this?” she asks her friends, not looking at Mem. “Did that smelly freak touch this? Yeah, I bet she touched these apples. Because they smell like shit.”
    She drops her apple as if it is hot and has burned her and the others follow suit, pulling apples up from the lawn and then dropping them, plop plop plop. The little one throws hers at the side of Mem’s house. Then they start to whisper their secret whispers and giggle their secret giggles and they draw themselves together and float away like cream.
    Mem chews on her lip and tries to wash the pulp off the ground without looking at her awful feet or inhaling her shitty smell. She feels like the scummy
schmutz
on the top of soup. She feels like the part of the deceased they vacuum out and throw away.
    But she is also going to be a star. She will make millions of dollars before any of these girls even figure out what they want to do with their silly lives. She will be a legend someday. She will be a Master. She will attend the funerals of each of these girls and make a fortune off of their demise. Maybe she will spit on their graves.
    When Mem goes back into her room to change, she finds her first set of blacks hanging by the molding around her bedroom doorway and forgets about the girls and the things they have said. She is finally getting her first real doole—black taffeta with a full, starched skirt—embroidered with tiny blue flowers around the collar and cuffs. Forget-me-nots, the mourner’s flower, the traditional emblem of her kind. There are also matching black Mary Janes, hard and glossy as ladybug’s wings, and a pair of white tights rolled up into a ball. They feel just like their name when she puts them on, a dry skin that doesn’t fit. They wrinkle at the ankles and knees.
    Before breakfast, Mem’s mother brushes Mem’s fine dark hair and smiles. “On the morning of my First Funeral my mother wouldn’t even let me have breakfast,” she says. “She thought not eating might make me cranky so I would weep harder. Really, it just made me more nervous. Ayin wasn’t old enough to go to the job so she was allowed to eat. She had french toast and milk and chewed with her mouth open so that I could watch every bite.”
    “That was mean,” says Mem.
    Mem’s mother stops smiling. She puts the brush down and looks at her daughter.
    “You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with my mother,” she says.
    Mem’s mother’s freshly painted false mouth suddenly makes the face look like someone else, a mask she has made and can’t take off. The someone-else says, “Go eat your breakfast,” as if the softness of Mem’s mother has hardened, dark along the edges like a cheese left out too long.
    Hanging on the hallway wall across from Mem’s room is a framed photograph of