Lindy moved to the music as they walked through the store, smiling at Jillian, and Jillian tried to smile back. Lindy pointed to short dresses and shorter skirts, outfits that looked too small for a grown person but too revealing for a child. “You’d look so cute in this,” she said, picking up a tube top. Jillian imagined coming down to breakfast in a shirt that looked like a sock with the foot cut off.

Lindy started pulling T-shirts out of folded piles. She looked at them, then tossed them aside. Jillian tried to fold them again, but Lindy unfolded them faster than she could neaten them up. She handed Jillian a heap of sweaters and leggings and dragged her toward the changing room.

The girls stood back-to-back as they peeled off their clothes and tried on the new ones. Jillian found a price tag on a light blue sweater that Lindy had picked for her. Nearly sixty dollars! “I don’t have any money,” she whispered.

“I do.”

“I can’t take your money.”

“Why not? If I give it to you? It’s a Christmas present. Merry Christmas.”

“It’s too much.” She’d gotten Lindy a pack of three lip glosses for Christmas—one strawberry, one grape, and one lime.

“It’s fine.”

Jillian frowned, struggling with what to do.

“Jill. My parents are loaded. Do you want it or not?”

Jillian wanted it. “That’s so nice of you.”

They waited in line to pay alongside wooden bins filled with vegetable-scented face masks, glass vials of flowery perfume, and lipsticks in shades from pink to black—treats as tempting as the candy in the checkout aisle at the supermarket. Was it okay to draw on the back of your hand with a lipstick? To paint a stripe of nail polish on the side of the bin to see what the color looked like? Jillian put caps back on as Lindy tossed the treasures back.

When they finally got to the register, Lindy stuck the credit card in the reader as if it was nothing, handing Jillian the bag with the sweater in it. Jillian would have to throw out the bag, of course, which felt wasteful since it was made of fabric instead of paper. Maybe she could wear the sweater home. Maybe her mom would think it was just an old one, though she doubted it. Her mother knew what Jillian owned better than she did. “I don’t have any sweaters,” Jillian might yell on her way out the door on a chilly day, and her mother would rattle off all of the sweaters she owned, going back to third grade.

“That was so generous of you, Lindy. My present is a lot smaller.”