“Kiss Clary Leach,” someone yelled. “That’s Miles’s girl. That’ll fetch him back from Berea.”

“Kiss me,” Ila Mae Slone said. She made a face to show how distasteful she would find it and broke into gales of laughter. Albion stared at the ground, frozen to his seat, holding the ear out at arm’s length as though it were cursed.

“Kiss Florrie,” I whispered. “Hit don’t matter that she’s married. Ben wont mind.”

He stirred, set the red ear at my feet.

“I dont want to kiss Florrie,” he said.

He leaned over and brushed my cheek with his lips. I shivered, folded my hands in my lap and tried to look like a lady.

Everyone except Ben and Flora hooted with laughter.

“Carrie’s a LITTLE girl! Cant you kiss nobody but a little girl?” Amos Preece taunted.

Albion stood up. “You’re just jealous,” he said. “That girl you was going to kiss has got more mouth than a bullfrog.”

He picked up his bucket, gathered an armload of corn, and walked away.

“Big for his britches, aint he?” Ila Mae said. “And him ugly as a mud pie.”

I hesitated before I followed him, for it seemed to me a choice from which there would be no retreat. They belonged and he did not, and to leave their circle and the warmth of it would mean that I possessed the power to cast myself into the outer darkness where moved the misfits, the lost, and the brave.

But I followed him. His kiss had marked me, and I was called out. I found him near the smokehouse, sat beside him and spread my skirt daintily around me. We shucked corn by ourselves for quite a while, never saying a word. Then Ben came and sat with us.

“Yall done sulking yet?” he asked.

“We aint sulking,” I retorted. “We just dont want to be round no mean people.”

“Aint you being a little hard on em? Most of em didnt mean no harm. Amos was smart-alecky, but Albion was right, Amos is just mad because he didn’t git the red ear first. And you know how Ila Mae is. She’s allays sour as if she ate a bait of persimmons.”

I giggled and looked at Albion.

“I reckon we ought to go back,” he said. “I shouldn’t have got so riled.”

“I didn’t say that,” Ben said. “You had a right to be riled. But they aint no reason to be all by yourself because of it. You’re like kin now. Come on back and set with us.”

Flora smiled at our return and indicated we were to sit beside her. Most of the corn was shucked and Farrie Whitt told a haint story around the bonfire. We ate popcorn, and Aunt Jane brought down taffy that the women had pulled from the new molasses. I looked around the circle at the smooth faces glowing in the firelight. Then I thought, what agony to truly be cut off from them.