Stacey said that she and David Michael sat right down at the kitchen table to have a snack. I hadn’t been gone for more than five minutes when Sam showed up. He seemed to be angry about something. He was slamming his fist into a baseball glove. But he stopped short when he saw Stacey sitting in the kitchen. According to Sam, Stacey was a foxy chick. According to Stacey, Sam was a gorgeous hunk. When I heard that later, I thought about what they looked like, and tried to figure out what they saw in each other. (I have absolutely no interest in boys, of course. Still, I realized that that kind of information might be useful some day.)

I remembered that Stacey was wearing a matching top and skirt made of gray sweat shirt material with big yellow number tens all over it. Her hair was pinned back with clips shaped like rainbows. Little silver whistles were dangling from her ears. It was all very cool, but it seemed kind of young-looking. And she was drinking a glass of milk.

I thought about Sam. Now, he is pretty good-looking, with dark curly hair and sparkly blue eyes and a few freckles, but he was wearing jeans so ratty he’d once promised Mom he’d throw them away (but then hadn’t been able to go through with it), and a T-shirt that said: I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? To top it off, he was mad.

So where did the foxy chick and the gorgeous hunk come from? Was it the perm? The freckles?

I couldn’t figure it out.