Jocelyn

WHO CAME UP WITH THE IDEA TO RUN NAKED through the pine grove behind Kenwood Academy? Who but Jocelyn? She had the balls, the boys didn't. She was eleven, the boys a full year older. Raymond had a flop of hair across his forehead while Winston, albino without clothes, had a wifHe. Flaxen locks flying, Jocelyn led the frolic through spokes of sunUght over a carpet of needles. Raymond was hard on her heels, followed by Winston. GaUoping, losing ground, Winston skidded, sUpped, and tumbled ass over teakettle. He rose cautiously, indignandy, and went behind a blueberry bush to pee.

The sound of a hornet beating its wings hovered near Jocelyn's ear as she confronted fern fronds and slashed through them Uke a warrior princess, two knights in her service, one momentarily indisposed. Birch trunks simulated the long legs of extinct animals. "We're in a fairy tale," she announced. Littering the bark of a dead pine were sacs of fur from which, Raymond told her, caterpillars had burst into miracles called moths. His father taught Ufe sciences. Jocelyn, whose mother birded, said that the gold of a finch is money in the bush. She glanced down and said, "Are you circumcised?"

"Can't you tell?"

A squirrel spied upon them. "Sure I can. Winston isn't."

Winston, frightened, caught up. "Shhh," he said, his whole face an alarm beU ready to ring. He had heard something, maybe even seen something.

"Like what?" Raymond said.

"A person."

"Let's get out of here," Jocelyn advised in the instant.

Running lickety-split, they bashed through inky swarms of black flies smearing the air, dodged stray skunk scat, slashed through ferns, and made it back to where they had chucked their clothes. Hands high on her hips, Jocelyn toed her garments, sifting, sorting, and abruptly her alert eyes narrowed. "Something's seriously missing."

Her white cotton underpants.

Dr. Wall told her to focus on memories that mattered. These came to mind:

Her mother plucks a tomato from the vine and eats it warm and unwashed, an act so thrillingly primitive that Jocelyn snatches one for herself, richly ripe but blemished as if from a bug bite. "Eat it, dear," her mother says. "Imperfections make life real." She is five, and her mother, lovely...