She always wore a faded blue dress that didn’t hang right. It
was clean, but it looked as though it had never been ironed properly.
She didn’t have any friends, but a lot of girls talked to her. Sometimes,
they surrounded her in the school yard as she stood watching the little
girls play hopscotch on the worn hard ground.
“Wanda,’’ Peggy would say in a most courteous manner, as though she
were talking to Miss Mason. “Wanda,” she’d say, giving one of her
friends a nudge, “tell us. How many dresses did you say you had
hanging up in your closet?”
The ‘most courteous manner’ here means that Peggy was
