Acts of God by Mary Morris

real. During recess some of us placed candy bar bets, daring one another to go up and tug on that hair. Some of the boys raced behind her and tried to grab it, but I just went right up and asked. “Can I touch your hair?” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw the gang, huddled, giggling.
    â€œSure,” Margaret said, giving me a wide smile, the way you do when you think someone’s going to be your friend. I reached out and touched it. It felt like a horse’s tail and was wavy as a snake. I thought it would turn itself into a serpent and wrap itself around my neck, but it didn’t. It just lay there, compliant, agreeable in my hand. It was smooth as silk and, though I was only doing this on a dare, I kept on holding it like a rope you could use to slide down the castle walls. To escape with. “You can touch my hair whenever you want,” Margaret said.
    â€œIt’s like a horse’s tail,” I announced when I got back to the huddle of the gang. “It’s real.” Still nobody believed me.
    She’d never catch up. How could she? She’d missed fractions and pioneer history. Half the social studies curriculum on petroleum. We’d already read three books for English, so we knew she couldn’t catch up. But she did. The first question Mrs. Grunsky asked, her pale hand shot up.
    She’d never be one of us. She’d never belong.
    We didn’t know anything about Margaret. Who she was or where she came from. We didn’t know how she got to and from school. She just appeared out of nowhere on a street corner and walked with us before we even asked her. We assumed she lived with her family in a house on the Winonah side of town—our side. For in Winonah we all had our visible histories. We had our families, our brothers and sisters. People by whom we located ourselves in space and time. We knew who we were. We never had to ask. Until Margaret came to town, there were no question marks after our names.
    Then one day my mother asked Elena, the Italian woman who ironed my father’s shirts, if she knew anything about the new family and who they were. Because that little girl kept coming around. And Elena told my mother that they’d moved into an apartment above Santini’s Liquor Store in Prairie Vista. Elena told my mother that there was just the mother, who dressed in short skirts that were too tight, and there was talk about her. Just that woman and her daughter. No man in sight.
    My mother was shocked, not because there was no man or because Mrs. Blair wore short, tight skirts, but because it was so rare that a child from Prairie Vista crossed over to Winonah. The lowest place you could live was above one of those stores across the tracks in Prairie Vista. And my mother made it clear, though I don’t remember how, that it would be better if I didn’t have much to do with someone who came from that part of town.
    *   *   *
    On weekends we went to one another’s houses. Vicky lived in a one-story ranch, like the one we first lived in before we built our two-story white Colonial. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I knew that’s how our parents referred to our houses—ranch, prairie, Colonial. Colonial was best, I knew that. Vicky’s father was a CPA and every morning he took the same train and came home on the same train like clockwork. Her mother had pure white hair even when we were small.
    We cut pictures out of magazines and glued them onto paper, making collages. We could do this endlessly. Time had not occurred to us yet. It was amazing we ever got from A to B, as Vicky’s mother liked to comment. Vicky’s mother was a large woman with square bones. I was afraid of her. She never hit us or yelled at us, but she just looked at us in a way that was frightening.
    Vicky was afraid of her as well. Vicky’s mother had little china things all over the house. Bone-china plates and china