Elizabeth.

      At 9:20 that morning, Elizabeth and I sat together on the colorful patchwork quilt, talking about the novel. We sat cross-legged on my old family quilt, and Elizabeth read a passage from the book’s first section, Fall, about one season in a year of big changes for Ellie Farley.

      “She was a nervous woman with a nervous laugh.”

      Elizabeth read aloud from a chapter entitled “At the Dinner Table.” A narrator’s voice conveys Ellie’s anxious feelings as she sits at the family dinner table. On the one hand, there are the “silences and secrets of four teenage girls”—Ellie’s sisters. Then there is Ellie’s mother, full of hurt and angry resignation.

      Elizabeth read aloud from the scene: “And though she had been welcoming with her warm arms when the girls were all small, she had withdrawn those arms more and more as the girls grew. Now Ellie couldn’t remember the last time she had been hugged by her mother.”²

      Elizabeth paused for a moment. The story made her think of the house where she lived.

      Elizabeth’s family lived out Perry Avenue, past Blair’s house. To get there, you turned down a small side street that dead-ended in a cul-de-sac. Beyond Elizabeth’s home was an industrial park; to its right was a weedy, overgrown lot. Elizabeth’s family owned the house, but the lot next door belonged to a slumlord who sometimes used it as a dump for old cars. Elizabeth’s world the year she was ten was the small universe of a dead-end street and a rundown two-story house packed with nine young bodies. The only way in or out was by means of the green van that her dad drove, packing everyone in to drive to and from school or other required destinations. He was still working on and off, but the family was one of the poorer ones even in a neighborhood known for its hard living.

      Elizabeth’s mother had family in nearby rural Indiana, and her grandmother still lived down there. Most Sundays, the kids were packed into the green van and driven across the state border to a small country church. Elizabeth would listen to the Sunday preaching, taking careful note of how the minister was eyeing the breasts of the teenage girls. Her mother had left the country at fourteen and had gotten pregnant with her first child. Now everyone was kept under the stern, watchful eye of Elizabeth’s father and—of course—the Lord Himself.

      As she read, Elizabeth must have found herself connecting with many of the things happening to Ellie. Like Ellie, she shared a bedroom with four sisters. The youngest, little Julie, was still getting potty trained and sometimes wet their shared bed. As a matter of fact, Elizabeth thought that she herself smelled like pee this morning because of Julie. And like Ellie in the novel, Elizabeth could not remember the last time she had gotten a hug from her mother. Her mother, a woman in her thirties, was pregnant again and stressed out from trying to raise the nine children she already had.

      Elizabeth looked to me, as if the realization had suddenly hit her.

      “Hey, the girl in the book is just like me!” she said.

      She seemed surprised at the threads of connection, but also excited—as though, I thought, she had stumbled upon an unexpected treasure, something that called to her as though it were meant to be hers, as she meandered through a junk store filled with dreary old relics.

      Eureka! I thought. This is it!—the kind of moment I had dreamed about when I created a reading class for girls. Here was Elizabeth, a young reader who seemed to be in her literary element. She was making strong personal connections to a novel. She was engaged and active—reading the book with a questioning and curious spirit, going back and forth between the novel’s fictional portrayal of a girl’s life and her own life.

      There was just one problem: Elizabeth didn’t like the book.

      “I’m sure you’re all excited about reading,” I offered hopefully as we sat on my quilt later that morning, having one of our first book group discussions that summer.

      “I’m not!” shot back Elizabeth.

      The idea of reading a novel about a girl like her was one big reason she didn’t care for the book.

      “It’s kind of stupid,” she remarked.

      Elizabeth’s observation stung a little, but I was determined to move ahead. The time felt right to dig into a character-driven novel.

      “Can some of you talk about how your life connects with Ellie’s life in A Blue-Eyed Daisy?”

      In the meantime, Elizabeth had embarked on a different agenda: finding the few swear words that appeared on the novel’s pages.

      “And she said a cuss word that says h-e-l-l,” Elizabeth said, thrilled with her discovery.

      This was, I knew, a time in Elizabeth’s life when the word hell had strong meaning. On their Sunday jaunts to the country church where her mother’s cousin did his preaching, the girls in the family learned about being saved from going to Hell. Now it was hard to get her thoughts wrapped around the kinds of things I wanted to discuss.

      “That is not a cuss word!” said Alicia.

      “What about my question?” I said, with more firmness in my voice. I was starting to grow irritated, or maybe just a little hurt.

      “There’s this boy that kissed her,” said Alicia. “Harold, his name was Harold.”

      “Oh, my gosh!” said Elizabeth, her long arms making a tiny movement upward, like a young sparrow about to flap its growing wings.

      The thing that meant the most to Elizabeth that summer was the door of friendship that had been opened to her by our group’s sweet-faced Alicia. Before this happened, Elizabeth didn’t have a best friend in school. She felt alone and disconnected in the world. At home were her eight siblings, ranging in age from a toddler in diapers to a girl in her teens, and Elizabeth’s stressed-out mother. But everything had changed with her discovery of a friendship that seemed fated to happen. One afternoon we had gone on a fieldtrip to a local bookstore so that each member of my class could pick out a book to call her own over the summer. Elizabeth chose an illustrated copy of The Secret Garden, and with the book came two necklaces with charms. It seemed only natural to her that one of the charms should go to Alicia.

      “Like the book said, Ellie was getting kissed,” said Alicia. “And a long time ago when I was little there was this stupid idiot boy that tried to kiss me. I smacked him and punched him and told my mom. But he kept on doing it, so I kicked him and I kept on beating him up, and he finally stopped.”

      Elizabeth said, “The only part that would’ve stopped him is to kick ’im where it hurts. That’s what I say.”

      “No, you don’t do that,” said Alicia.

      “Uh huh, I would do it,” said Elizabeth.

      “Are there other ways that Ellie’s life experiences or her feelings connect with your life?” I asked.

      Blair sat opposite Elizabeth and Alicia on our quilt. She thought about the bedroom she shared with her grandma, her little niece, and sometimes one of her half sisters. The teenage boys, her half brothers, came in and out of the room at night when they wanted to watch television, and