She wanted to turn this over in her mind, and she wanted to do this alone. Not with Mom or Dad. Not with Nana or Papa. Never had she yearned for the solitude of her own mind. Now she needed it.

As they’d climbed into the van, Chamique had silently handed Macey a paper plate stacked with Dorothy Edna’s cinnamon-icing sticky buns. Neatly sandwiched in the layers of plastic wrap were enough paper napkins to go around. Macey passed the buns. They were scrumptious. She would save one for Nana to try to duplicate.

“Oh, no!” said Grace suddenly. “We didn’t give them the beanbag chairs and the crayon can.”

Macey was glad. She had met only four kids from the church, and none of the sixes who would play in the room of gold, but she wanted something else for them.

We give Good Shepherd our old supplies and our old furniture, she thought, picking up a ruined crayon. I thought that was kind. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s saying: You don’t deserve anything as good as we have. You can have our leftovers. But you can’t have anything new and just right.

Austin smiled at her with cinnamon-icing lips and patted the seat next to him.

“And my face,” she said to him very softly when they were next to each other, and now she did begin to cry. “Oh, Aus, if it weren’t for you, if you hadn’t been there, my face would be burned.”

He put his arm around her and hauled her in close, resting his cheek against her crinkly hair, while Lindsay and Grace made annoying little coos of observation.

Venita was right. One nice thing.

Austin.

The instant Graff pulled up at the church, Lindsay was out of the van, unlocking her own car and pulling out her phone. “I’m calling my hairdresser,” she said to Macey. “We’ll drive straight over.” Into the phone she said, “Sasha, we have a hair emergency. You must fit us in.”

“Let’s all go,” said Austin.

Macey did not know how she felt about having a party during the shaving of her head.

“Sasha will take you,” said Lindsay, handing Macey the phone. “Now get your fibs ready, call your mother, and yes, of course everybody can go. We’ll stop to buy a disposable camera first.”

“No!” shrieked Macey. She turned to Grace for support, but Grace whispered, “If we’d had a camera in the van, you’d have a picture of yourself in Austin’s arms.”

That was tempting, and Macey was sorry such a picture did not exist, but she certainly didn’t want any pictures of herself until she knew what she looked like. It was unfair that everybody could inspect the hair emergency except Macey herself.