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felt embarrassed at knowing and embarrassed on behalf of all the mothers and fathers of her acquaintance. She wished she could un-know it. She resented Rosie for telling her.
    Miss Thompson was writing page numbers on the blackboard, and Helen’s classmates were taking out geography books. She did, too, opening to a chapter titled “The Dark Continent.” She shook off her disgruntlement with Rosie. After all, she had asked. She had wanted the secret, for a secret it clearly was. It was just that she’d never before considered that asking and finding out could result in a burden of knowledge impossible to ignore, an actual weight on the mind and heart. She wondered if further revelations lay in store. And she wondered what other hidden things she already knew.

CHAPTER 7
    OCTOBER 1937
    Helen heard honking and paused in her raking to look up at a V-formation of Canada geese flying by. They were the first flock she’d spotted this year. They seemed bulky in the sky, their wings pumping valiantly, necks strained anxiously forward.
    After they’d passed, Helen became aware of another sound, the metallic swish, swish of a grass rake. She went to the plank fence and stepped onto the wooden soda crate kept there as a stool. Next door, working intently at the far side of his yard, Billy Mackey was also raking. His task was harder than hers, because the Mackeys had more trees, including three old apple trees. He was wearing baggy wool trousers and a snug sweater vest, and he had rolled his shirtsleeves up. Yellow jackets were circling him, disturbed from feasting on the rotten windfall fruit he was raking up along with the leaves.
    Helen delayed calling to him. There was something enjoyable about watching him when he didn’t know she was there. She admired how the muscles of his arms moved with each pull on the rake and how his torso twisted rhythmically like a little piece of a Fred Astaire dance. His sandy hair, usually tamed with brilliantine, had shaken loose with his exertions, and a couple of locks hung down over his forehead, the ends curled like commas. She wondered that it didn’t bother him, and if she’d been close enough, she didn’t think she could resist reaching out and pushing it back for him.
    â€œHey!” he said in greeting, noticing her at last. She’d been
standing there only a minute, but it had seemed much longer.
    â€œHey,” she answered.
    He leaned his rake against a tree trunk and walked toward her. He was smiling, and to see that smile warmed her ridiculously.
    â€œWhat’s cookin’?” he said when he reached the fence. He had to tilt his head to look up at her, and when he did, the errant locks of hair fell back off his forehead. Her desire to brush at them with her fingers remained, however.
    â€œI’ve got to rake our yard, too,” she said.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œHow come your brother’s not helping you?”
    â€œBasketball practice.”
    â€œOh, right,” Helen remembered. Lloyd Mackey was the star of the eighth-grade team.
    â€œBut I’m gonna leave some for him,” Billy said. “Maybe in the corner where there’s the most apples. Darn yellow jackets bit me twice already.”
    He held up one arm to show her a red swelling near his elbow, then turned his head and pointed to another, meaner swelling on the side of his neck. Helen felt a quick, dropping sensation in her gut, like when her father drove too fast over a dip in the road.
    â€œWant some baking soda?”
    â€œNaw. Can’t even feel the one on my arm anymore.”
    He backed away, turning after a few steps and trotting to where he’d left the rake. Helen climbed down and resumed her own raking. Soon she’d accumulated three satisfying piles.
    â€œHelen, hey, Helen!” she heard from the Mackey yard.
    She went to the crate. Billy was right at the fence, his hand over one ear, a grimace of pain on his face.
    â€œGot