“Alv?”

Nora looked around. “Don’t know where he is now. He found part of a deer’s head. Gross. Still had skin on it.”

Suddenly this half-rotted skull loomed over the edge of the tree. Lew screamed and Raj pushed himself back into Annie. Its appearance was closely followed by Alvin’s plump round face, grinning stupidly. Worried for Lew, who was now covering the back of his neck with both hands, Annie snatched the skull from Alvin and flung it away.

“Hey,” Alvin shouted, “what you do that for?”

Annie clambered over to Lew, pried his hands gently from his nape, and put her arms around him. Turning back to Alvin, she said furiously, “What are you doing here?”

Alvin was too absorbed with pulling himself up onto the rim of the tree to respond. When he had steadied himself, he stared at the Indian boy with his buggy eyes a moment; then his words gushed out in a nonsensical stream, punctuated by his odd little snort of a laugh. “My dad says you’re different from a Negro; says you come from a place where they don’t believe in God or improving yourself; they got men there can move their internal organs around. You’re blacker than some Negroes, though; I seen Negroes look almost white. You do look like a white person a bit, but you’ve got pale palms.”

“Oh, shut up, Alvin,” Annie said.

Alvin looked abashed. Annie knew he wasn’t being cruel. It was just his nature; he was younger than the rest of them. He began to pick at something in his nose.

“Guys,” Nora cried plaintively, from the base of the tree.

Annie leaned over the edge again. “Come on, Nor. Just climb up. It’s easy.”

Nora looked up at the tree helplessly, which irritated Annie. Nora was a German girl, blond and stocky, her breasts already sizable, but though—or perhaps because—her body wasn’t designed for grace, she was almost obsessively particular about the way she carried herself. At church picnics she would take a full ten minutes to arrange her limbs on the grass, smoothing every crease in her skirt, tucking her legs modestly to one side, laying her napkin square in her lap. It was as if the soul of a cat had found its way into the body of a cow. The second this formulation came to Annie, remorse flashed through her. There was a part of her, and she hated it, that was too impatient and critical.

“I’ll help you up,” Annie said, but Raj had already leaped down.

“It’s easier to get up the other side,” he told her.

Nora followed him around and he made a little cradle of his fingers to give her a leg up. Annie noticed Raj modestly averting his eyes as Nora rose above him, which made her smile. She and Lew pulled her the rest of the way, which was hard, since she was heavy—not fat but solid. Having to do this annoyed Annie again; Nora was strong, but clearly felt it wasn’t ladylike to haul herself up. Finally Nora settled herself primly at the rim, her face flushed. Raj quickly rejoined them and they all sat around the hollow, their legs dangling into the darkness.