Ginger had satellites, though the girls around her perhaps did not think of themselves that way. Each person probably thought of herself, though it was hard to believe, as the center of the universe, just as Owen did. There were a lot of Barbaras—Barbara Emerich, Barbara Jane Gross, Barbara Dolinski—and Alice Stottlemeyer and Georgene King and Carolyn McManus and Grace Bickta, all from Owen’s street or the streets above, who collected on the sidewalks and walked together to elementary school and back. It was Alice Stottlemeyer, shorter than the others and, like Owen, saddled with glasses on her nose, who first kissed him with a secret meaning, a sort of push with her mouth, tight but soft, at a game of spin-the-bottle they were playing at somebody’s birthday party, not Owen’s. His own birthday parties, when his mother gave them, were usually disasters that sent him up the stairs to his room crying, because his guests were having more fun than he, the birthday boy, who had not received exactly the presents he had hoped for. His mother would never allow the game of spin-the-bottle. Their glasses clicked, his and Alice’s, in the little kiss while the other children crowed and jeered and then fell silent, seeing they were kissing seriously, all in a second. Then the bottle spun on, in the center of the ring they made, on the linoleum floor or painted concrete floor of the basement they were in, converted to a den or rumpus room.