she’d wait a long time. It wasn’t like Penny and she had anything in common either. Growing up as neighbors on a rural street had meant they hung out together—or used to—but only because the street didn’t offer much in the way of choices. Alice glanced at Penny, a girl she’d known forever, and a little shame fissured her sour thoughts. They’d had fun. Sometimes.
Truthfully, Alice’s two longest lasting friendships couldn’t have been more different. She and Madison had played dress-up, invented boyfriends, experimented with nail polish, pretended to be models and doctors and teachers—basically practiced growing up.
She and Penny, on the other hand, had played Martians, mixed milkweed potions, inspected animal tracks in the woods, and spied on the mailman. Penny had formulated the adventures; Alice had trailed her in bemusement.
They’d stopped playing when Penny’s mother, red-faced and apologetic, had brought a grocery bag to Alice’s mother, a bag filled with things Penny had taken from their house. Alice remembered her mother’s confusion when they’d dumped the returned possessions on the dining room table and taken stock of what had been stolen: a polka-dotted sock with a hole in the toe, a toothbrush, Alice’s crumpled composition on George Washington, an empty perfume bottle, a cheap picture-day comb, her mother’s broken hand-mixer…garbage.
“What the hell?” Alice’s mother had exclaimed.
Alice, though puzzled too, couldn’t have said she was exactly surprised. What she mostly had felt was relief, an easing in her chest, a sense of lightness, even freedom. The thefts had given her the excuse she’d wanted—needed—to cut ties with her neighbor. Penny had become a liability. The girl