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his space suit.
    "Get out of here," Mary Alice yelled at her little brother. Then she called him a name we never ever ever used. Not in our family ever, north or south. We said Negro or colored or black. The bad boys at school used that other word. But this girl, Mary Alice, she just said it, out loud, like that, like she said it every day. I had never heard a girl, no matter how old, speak this way, and it gave me a queer, cold, sick feeling.
    "You're not the boss of me," Jeffy said, and stomped out of the room.
    "I'm bored," one girl said, throwing down her pillow date, not caring what Mary Alice had just said.
    "Let's keep on talking like grownups," another girl said, tossing her pillow alongside the other.
    "Mary Alice?" I finally said. "Can we just go outside now?"
    And all at once we were changing to swim in Mary Alice's swimming pool.
    "Do my straps, will you?" Mary Alice asked me. Me! I was helping Mary Alice with her swimsuit. Her skin was a perfect brown and her sparrow shoulder blades jutted out like wings.

    ***
    Mary Alice was the first girl I knew who wore a bikini. Hers was pink gingham. Everybody else wore a one-piece with a belt or two full-coverage pieces, some with skirts built in. I had circle-shaped brown marks on my sides from my cut-out swimsuit, which had been new and special when my mother had bought it for me back in June, but was now saggy and faded from swimming in my grandfather's pool in Franklin all summer, the summer my grandmother called "my recovery."
    The McLemores had an in-ground pool
with
landscaping. We all took turns with the Hula-Hoop I had given Mary Alice. She said she had four others, but none with pink and silver sparkles like this one.
    When Mary Alice's brother Stone brought out a tray of Coca-Colas, I jumped into the pool so he wouldn't see me in my suit. I didn't like the idea of being almost completely naked in front of anyone, let alone Stone. It wasn't that I was shy. It was mostly because I didn't think I looked too good almost naked.
    Sneaking stares at him again, I decided he was surely the handsomest boy I had ever seen. This was a boy you want to marry. This was a boy who was good and kind because he said women needed protecting and he brought out Coca-Colas for his kid sister's birthday party.
    Some of the girls played how-long-can-you-hold-your-breath, swimming underwater the length of the pool, sometimes twice. Stone dived in, and he didn't make a big show of taking in his breath before he went under. After one length, two lengths, then half of the third length of the pool, he shot up from the deep end, laughing and gasping for air, his hair spraying a crown of thousands of water drops. Yes. He really was the most beautiful handsome boy I'd ever seen.
    Paddling around in the deep end, I realized then and there that, excluding her kid brother, Jeffy, Mary Alice had the perfect family and the perfect life. When you're an only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool.
    But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edge of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life.
    "Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.
    We swam until the sun set and then changed into our sleep clothes. Mary Alice wore a nightgown that my mother would have had me wear as a good party dress. Everybody else wore baby-doll pajamas with bloomer panties. I wore one of Tine's old faded cotton nightgowns.
    That night Mary Alice