Yet the girls all around him seemed remote from these essentials. They had brown legs from being at the playground all summer, and could run as fast as he. They liked to win at all the games—roof ball and box hockey and Chinese checkers. Ginger Bitting, a girl in his class from Second Street, would hang upside down from the jungle gym, hanging on with only her bent legs while her arms, thin and freckled and with a whitish fuzz, reached down toward the dust, and her long hair, clay-red and fine like the dust, hung down between her arms. If her legs let go she would drop and might break her neck, as did the boy at camp under poor Danny Hoffman’s care. But she never did. Ginger, with her freckles, and her eyes like green glass a light was shining through, was the most daring, the most wiry girl in his class at grade school, the fastest on her feet, the best singer, and the captain of the girls’ team when the boys played them at soccer at recess. If she stole his cap or plaid book bag on the way home from school he could never catch her until she let him. On the playground swing she would kick out and soar; the swing chains would snap and tug and shake the pipe frame, pulling her back from falling as she reached horizontal; still she kicked higher, her brown legs stiff. He watched her feet reach for the sky, in their creased and scuffed leather shoes. Back then, he could wear ankle-high sneakers in summer but girls wore real shoes, with laces and smooth soles.

The playground was approached from the alley behind Owen’s house, on a path between two cornfields, and then along a kind of grassy road between the baseball bleachers and a row of cherry trees gone wild. Ginger would climb these trees in her slippery shoes, higher than Owen would ever dare. He would watch her as she ascended, but he never saw up her shorts anything like the complicated business drawn on the back of the equipment shed. In the quiet, long-shadowed hour after the playground supervisor and the other children had gone home, and the equipment—the hockey sticks and Ping-Pong paddles and checkerboards—was all locked up, Owen would experiment on the jungle gym, hanging by his arms and bent knees and daring himself to let go with his hands. But he never could. If he fell and broke his neck he would lie there all night, darkness and dew covering him, and be found only in the morning, when the supervisor, bossy, fussy Miss Mull, arrived at nine o’clock to run up the flag on the pole and lead the assembled children in the Pledge of Allegiance.