The little girl in the pink dress arrived home at the usual time.  Her mother, with nothing else to do with her time in the mornings before afternoon kindergarten, had braided her hair and tied it with satin ribbons the color of her dress.  She had blue clay under her fingernails and marker on her elbows.  Band-aids decorated her knees in polka-dot and neon memorials of recesses past.  Thin whispers of eyebrows were pressed ostentatiously low above her eyes, and the cheeks glistened with moisture and were the color of crabapples in the sun.

The neighbor-girl was in the sandbox in her front yard, watching the big yellow bus through greedy eyes.  She was only four-and-a-half.

“Hey, Stacey!” she called, waving her shovel.  “I got a sandbox!  Do you?”

Stacey paused at the rim of the box.  She clicked the toe of her shoe against it.  “Nope.”

The neighbor-girl tapped the shovel against a mound of sand.  “I made a dragon.”

“Dragons aren’t real.”

Stacey wiped imaginary dust from her palms onto the front of her pink dress.  She cast a glance toward her house, forcing out her lower lip at it, big and wet and filled with blood.

“You’re crying,” observed the neighbor-girl, triumphantly.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’ve got tears.  That makes you a crybaby.”

With a grunt, Stacey loosened her knees until she fell backward onto the grass, propping herself into a sitting position with her hands.  For several moments she kneaded the grass between her fingers, feeling its softness while at the same time allowing the edges of the blades to bite into her tender pink skin.  An insect crawled onto her thumb, and she raised her hand to watch it trace the whorls on her finger with its antennae before she crushed it silently between her thumb and forefinger.  She wiped the remains onto her sock, and black blood and tiny body parts formed a checkmark across the lace.

“Ginger Howard was mean to me today,” Stacey said at last.

“I can do something you can’t do,” said the little neighbor-girl.