Outside I skipped in the sun.
“We’re going to be next-yard neighbours,” I cried, and that reminded me of the New Boy. I told her about him as we went round by the gate, there being no cross piece for a foothold on that side the fence.
“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth, “I know him. He’s drove me home by my braids. He doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well,” I said earnestly, “when you get a chance, you tell him that I wasn’t calling him dirt. I says if he was dirt, how could he tell to be a potato or an apple.”
Mary Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of boys pretend mad,” she said philosophically, “to get you to run after them.”
This was new to me. Could it be possible that you had to imagine folks, and what they really meant, as well as tending to all the other imagining?
“Can’t you stay over?” I extended hospitality to Mary Elizabeth.
She could “stay over,” it seemed, and without asking. This freedom of hers used to fill me with longing. To “stay over” without asking, to go down town, to eat unexpected offerings of food, to climb a new tree, as Mary Elizabeth could do, and all without asking! It was almost like being boys.
Now that Mary Elizabeth was to be a neighbour, a new footing was established. This I did not reason about, nor did I wonder why this footing might not be everybody’s footing. We merely set to work on the accepted basis.
This comprised: Name, including middle name, if any, and for whom named; age, and birthday, and particulars about the recent or approaching birthday; brothers and sisters, together with their names, ages, and birthdays; birthstones; grade; did we comb our own hair; voluntary information concerning tastes in flowers, colours, and food; and finally an examination and trying on of each other’s rings. The stone had come out of Mary Elizabeth’s ring, and she had found a clear pink pebble to insert in its place. She had, she said, grated the pebble on a brick to make it fit and she herself thought that it looked better than the one that she had lost, “but,” she added modestly, “I s’pose it can’t be.”