That evening she shows up at our front door in a kind of quiet, contained rage. She and my mother talk in the living room, and I am called in. My mother asks if I have cut Mikey’s hair, and I confess that I have, and Mikey’s mother makes me a speech. She says, He likes you, he likes everyone, Mikey trusts you, he doesn’t know what you know, he can’t do the things you can do, and you don’t have the right to treat him like that, you don’t have the right to treat him like he’s nothing and cut his hair. It’s not all right to treat a friend like that.

I am so ashamed that I don’t want to play with Mikey anymore, because I’ve done a bad thing. I’ve abused some power granted to me by accident. I don’t see him much, so I’m startled, as my mother is, when Mikey and his mother ring our doorbell on Christmas Eve, and there he stands—hair grown back now into his stiff little brush cut—with a small package in his hand, a wrapped gift for me, a little yellow bulldozer, the sort of toy I’d never ask for myself but which I like: painted metal, detailed, with precisely turned wheels. Of course we don’t have a present for Mikey—who’d have thought to? But Mikey’s mother lets us know that’s not the point, they just wanted to come and bring me a gift; Mikey wanted to give presents to his friends. Even then I can see what she’s doing; it’s not about me, she’s working to make things normal for her son, so that he can do the things that children do on Christmas.