The mothers of other thirteen-year-old girls assure Sally such behavior is normal. Linda Bennett, next door, insists this adolescent gloom is temporary, even though her daughter, Jessie—whom Kylie has always avoided, describing her as a loser and a nerd—recently changed her name to Isabella and has pierced her navel and her nose. But Sally hasn’t expected to go through this with Kylie, who’s always been so open and good-natured. Thirteen with Antonia was no great shock, since she’d always been selfish and rude. Even Gillian didn’t go wild until high school, when the boys realized how beautiful she was, and Sally never gave herself permission to be moody and disrespectful. She didn’t think she had the luxury to talk back; as far as she knew, nothing was legal. The aunts didn’t have to keep her. They had every right to cast her out, and she wasn’t about to give them a reason to do so. At thirteen, Sally cooked dinner and washed the clothes and went to bed on time. She never thought about whether or not she had privacy or happiness or anything else. She never dared to.
Now, with Kylie, Sally holds herself back, but it isn’t easy to do. She keeps her mouth closed, and all her opinions and good advice to herself. She flinches when Kylie slams doors; she weeps to see her pain. Sometimes Sally listens outside her daughter’s bedroom, but Kylie no longer bothers to confide in Gillian. Even that would be a relief, but Kylie has pulled away from everyone. The most Sally can do is watch as Kylie’s isolation becomes a circle: the lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can’t begin to understand. This Sally knows better than most. She knows it late at night, when Gillian is at Ben Frye’s, and the moths tap against the window screens, and she feels so separated from the summer night that those screens might as well be stones.
It appears that Kylie will spend her whole summer alone in her room, serving time just as certainly as if she were in prison. July is ending with temperatures in the nineties, day in and day out. The heat has caused white spots to appear behind Kylie’s eyelids whenever she blinks. The spots become clouds, and the clouds rise high, and the only way to get rid of them is to do something. Quite suddenly she knows this. If she doesn’t do something, she could get stuck here. Other girls will continue, they’ll go on and have boyfriends and make mistakes, and she will be exactly the same, frozen. If she doesn’t make a move soon, they’re all going to pass her by and she’ll still be a child, afraid to leave her room, afraid to grow up.
At the end of the week, when the heat and humidity make it impossible to close windows or doors, Kylie decides to bake a cake. It is a small concession, a tiny step back into the world. Kylie goes out to buy the ingredients, and when she gets home it’s ninety-six in the shade, but that doesn’t stop her. She’s driven about this project of hers, almost as if she believes she’ll be saved by this one cake. She turns the oven to four hundred degrees and gets to work, but it’s not until the batter is ready and the pans are greased that she realizes she’s about to bake Gideon’s favorite cake.
All afternoon the cake sits on the kitchen counter, frosted and untouched, on a blue platter. When evening falls, Kylie still doesn’t know what to do. Gillian is at Ben’s, but no one answers the phone when Kylie calls to ask Gillian if she thinks it’s foolish for her to go to Gideon’s. Why does she even want to? What does she care? He was the one who was rude; shouldn’t he be the one to make the first move? He should be bringing her the damn cake, as a matter of fact—a chocolate chip pound cake with maple frosting, or mocha if that’s the best he can do.
Kylie goes to sit by her bedroom window in search of cool, fresh air, and instead discovers a toad sitting on the sill. A crab apple tree grows just outside her window, a wretched specimen that hardly ever flowers. The toad must have found its way along the trunk and the limbs, then leapt into her window. It’s bigger than most of the toads you can find near the creek, and it’s amazingly calm. It doesn’t seem frightened, not even when Kylie lifts it and holds it in her hand. This toad reminds her of the ones she and Antonia used to find in the aunts’ garden each summer. They loved cabbage and leaf lettuce and would hop after the girls, begging for treats. Sometimes Antonia and Kylie would take off running, just to see how fast the toads could go; they’d race until they collapsed with laughter, in the dust or between the rows of beans, but no matter how far they’d gone, when they turned around, the toads would be right on their heels, eyes unblinking and wide.
Kylie leaves the toad on her bed, then heads off to look for some lettuce. She feels guilty and foolish about having listened to Antonia all those times when they forced the toads to chase them. She’s not that silly anymore; she’s got more sense and a whole lot more compassion. Everyone is out and the house is more peaceful than usual. Sally is at a meeting Ed Borelli has called, to plan for the opening of school in September, a reality none of the office staff cares to recognize as inevitable. Antonia is at work, watching the clock and waiting for Scott Morrison to appear. Down in the kitchen, it’s so quiet that the water from the dripping faucet echoes. Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure. As soon as you let go of it, pride shrinks to the size of a fly, but one that has no head, and no tail, and no wings with which to lift itself off the ground.