Other girls—in a larger group—came up with another game, a different method of governance and control. They kept stealing the scuffed black loafer of a classmate, throwing it back and forth to one another while she lunged after it—always too late—over and over again. Would Lonnie have been a joiner in this group? Would she have started the game? She wouldn’t have been the poor girl with the dirty white sock, hopping on one foot, her braids coming out in thin wisps—would she?

I saw her sometimes as the solitary soul on the monkey bars, yelling to the other girls occasionally, but not playing with them. She was more concerned with her own body’s dexterity than anything else. She was hanging upside down, her hair standing on end below her red face, a headband on the ground below her, her pleated skirt flipped up over her shirt, her white cotton panties fully exposed. This girl was at least eight years old—too old to be showing off her underwear so brazenly. Too old for her obvious lack of shame.

The older Marymount girls, the middle school girls, still came here after school sometimes, not to play, but to sit and gossip as they waited for the time they must return home. They no longer used the playground for recess, but once I spent a half hour watching them use the fire poles and pull-up bars for gym class. They were not wearing the skirts of course, but little cap-sleeved tees and navy cotton shorts emblazoned with the school name. Many wore blue hair bows above their ponytails, pearl earrings. I watched them climb up the pole—most doing so quickly, a few struggling and being cheered on by their classmates. I watched them jump and hang from the pull-up bar. I watched the way their muscles moved as they learned to use their own bodies as weights. I watched them line up and drop to the pavement for push-ups.

I suppose my school had been militant like this in gym class as well, but there had certainly been a wider range of ability—and a wider range of body type. Their little cap-sleeved T-shirts all fit snugly across taut bellies, the thin legs of their blue shorts showed clearly a dozen sets of skinny thighs and perky asses. Where was the overweight girl struggling to keep up? Where was the too-skinny one—as I had been—looking two years younger than the rest of her classmates, swimming in her gym clothes?

I saw these same girls, back in their blue skirts and stark white tops, eating crepes out of little paper triangles at three o’clock when William woke from his afternoon nap and we ventured again onto the streets. They laughed as they licked melted Nutella from their fingers. They owned the city already, yet they were nothing, had done nothing to earn it.