Standing there on the doorstep was a girl of Suzie’s age or maybe a little older, who could tell, since the girls in this town all looked as alike as pennies. This girl was dressed in black, all black, in a skirt that fell to the ground and a tight black blouse unbuttoned partway down to expose a black brassiere and the tops of her breasts. On her forehead, centered precisely, was a third eye reproduced in acrylic paint, or maybe that was a hallucination too?

“Hi,” the girl said, in a voice that had too much air in it, a kind of a squeak of a voice, “is Nancy in?”

“Nancy?” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the name before in her life.

“Nancy Eggers? She told me to meet her here at seven, I mean, if this is the right place?”

She was about to say something in response, to say yes, when the girl said, “Wow, I love your costume,” making a gesture with one hand as if to indicate the whole picture, the doorframe, the jack-o’lanterns, the white gloves and pillbox hat and the shadows warring beyond. “Jackie Kennedy, right?”

Despite herself, despite the fact that she was just beginning to feel untethered, she was pleased, as if she’d been transformed into a girl herself. “Yes,” she said, and felt herself smile.

“Cool,” the girl said, looking beyond her into the depths of the hallway before coming back to her. “As a goof, right?”

“Right,” she said. “As a goof.” Though that scrambled things further, because her intention hadn’t been satiric at all—she admired Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady, the woman who’d brought some style to the White House after the relentless dowdiness of Mamie Eisenhower and the dreariness that seemed to radiate outward from her till it swallowed up the whole country in nonentityness, if that was even a word. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was getting back to the circle and the trip and the opening up of all her senses, including the ones she didn’t yet know she had. “I think Nancy went into town with, with—”

“I’m right here,” a voice intoned behind her and she turned round on Nancy, who was dressed exactly like the girl on the front steps, right down to the third eye, and looking not at all like the sixteen-year-old she would be in two weeks’ time but a girl—a woman—already in her twenties. She was showing her bra too—and what it supported—and that was wrong, that was inappropriate, and before she knew what she was saying she said, “You look nice. What’re you dressed as?”

Nancy gave her an even look. “Same as Lori,” she said.