I thought this was a third voice, another girl, but I couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile, my eyes recovered. The flashlight beam dropped, but its glow illuminated the three who sat there. One of them had a kind of werewolf mask perched on the top of his head. The girl beside him, the middle one of the three, wore a quaint blue dress and ruby-red shoes and had her hair up in pigtails. She was cute. The girl on the end was far enough away from the flashlight that I couldn’t get a good look at her. She wore some kind of a cloak with its large hood down, resting on her shoulders.

“I’m Paul,” I said nervously.

“I knew it! I’m Shirley,” said the first girl, and I recognized her from third-period art class. Not that we had ever really talked.

“Hi, Dorothy,” I said.

“Hey, Paul, pal,” the guy said in a radio announcer’s nasally drawn-out voice, and the girls laughed again. “I’m Tom. Lucky for you it’s not a full moon.”

“And I’m Mary,” the second girl said. “I’m the Grim Reaper.” Her voice and the way she carried herself couldn’t have been any less threatening. She seemed to be drowning in her costume, and her voice lilted like silk rolling in the breeze.

I almost burst out laughing at the contrast between her kind voice and her foreboding costume. Her tiny hand came up out of the deep sleeve of her cloak, and the feel of her skin was a revelation. Her hands were ice-cold but soft. I didn’t want to let go. For the rest of the night after touching her hand, I was in another realm. I was floating. I’m not sure how I managed to form words, much less express actual ideas.

I fell to a sitting position among them, not knowing that what I had actually tripped into were not strangers who had also escaped the party but the best two years of my life.

“Well,” the boy named Tom said, “the real question is, now what?”

The Tea Party

I am standing by the front door, remembering that first time I met Mary. I haven’t thought about that for a long time.

You have gone inside to hunt down the plastic cups and saucers your dad bought you when you were five. The house smells like pinewood floor cleaner. I am, if nothing else, organized, and I keep a clean house. There seems to be something crucial in keeping a clean house for you, a tidy place for you to grow up. Or, I should say, seemed. Past tense. The doctor’s diagnosis makes me question everything: what we are doing, what I have done. Should I have found a younger family to raise you a long time ago so that I would not be all you have? Is that what was at the root of Ms. Howard’s judgmental glance—scorn at the idea that someone as old as me could be trusted to live long enough to raise someone as young as you?