Karen shows him the hammer in her hand. “Go away. Stop coming here.”

He raises his hands in surrender. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Why?”

He lowers his head and starts nodding slowly, as if trying to recall lines he’d previously memorized. “What happened,” he begins. “I didn’t mean it. Cross my heart. It was meant to be a joke. Karen…”

To Karen’s ears, there’s something oddly pleading in the way he’s talking to her, as if they’re friends who’ve had a misunderstanding.

“Do you think you could forgive me one day? Karen?”

Karen hastily closes the window and puts the hammer back under the bed, then changes her mind and slips it under her blanket, holding it against her chest like a doll.

She recalls having once felt a little sorry for Ricky Stokes. All those stories that followed him around, though no one dared taunt him with them. She’d noticed that he still wore his summer uniform trousers in the winter, and that they hung above his ankles so he couldn’t hide his grubby white socks. The torn collar on his shirt—it was always the same shirt—made her think of a dog whose ear had been bitten off in a fight. Perhaps he’d caught her staring at him once, had caught the sympathy in her eyes and been offended by it. Perhaps, she thought, this was his revenge.

HONG KONG, 1941

Idiot Boy is covered in shit. Jun-Jun prods his back with a stick and commands him to stand next to the bucket of water.

“This is what happens when you don’t look where you’re going,” she hisses, ladling water over his head. He whimpers like a dog expecting to be kicked.

The crowd of villagers looks on from a safe distance, stifling giggles and waving their hands in front of their wrinkled noses. One of them, Brother Yuen, the fish seller, says he saw it all: the boy running along the stream, his arms outstretched and tongue hanging out, undeterred even when Brother Yuen began yelling at him for trampling his wife’s lettuce heads.

“He just kept running and running, and—plop!—straight into the manure tank,” Brother Yuen tells the crowd. “He screamed for help, but by the time I got there, Jun-Jun was already trying to pull him out with a rope. The whole time he was squealing like a pig being slaughtered! All that trouble, and for what, you might ask? Chasing a dragonfly!”

The villagers cannot help their snorting and cackling, though Brother Yuen is quick to add, “Little Sister Jun-Jun really is a saint, though. Strong, too.”

Jun-Jun turns to the crowd, the edges of her mouth hardened somewhere between a grimace and a smile. “Forgive me for distracting you all from your very important business. Please don’t waste another moment of your time on this worthless spectacle.”