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Girl. Not if you wanted any other kids to like you. Del was a pariah. The kid all the others loved to hate. She was too skinny, and came to school in worn, dirty clothes that were often hand-me-downs from her brothers. She was two years older than most of the other fifth graders, having stayed back in kindergarten and then again in fourth grade.
    She had dirt so thick on her neck that it looked like maybe she really was dug up from the ground like one of the potatoes they grew on her family’s farm. She was pale enough to be from underground. And if you got close enough to her, you got a whiff of moist earth.
    Maybe, just maybe, if I’d had any other friends back then, if I’d sworn allegiance to anyone else, I wouldn’t have started cutting across those frozen fields hoping to catch a glimpse of her naked on a pony. Maybe then I wouldn’t have met her at all. She wouldn’t have shown me her secret in the root cellar or made me touch the dead crow.
    But I had no friends, and I, like Del, was an outsider. A kid from New Hope who came to school with a lunch box full of steamed vegetables, thick slabs of grainy homemade bread, and dried fruit for dessert. How I longed to be a white-bread-and-bologna girl then. Or even, like Del, to have the worn brass tokens the poor kids used in the cafeteria to buy a hot lunch each day. Something to link me to some group, some ring of kids, instead of sticking out like the sore thumb I was, eating my hippie lunch alone, smiling stupidly at anyone who walked by my table.
    The Griswolds’ farm was at the bottom of Bullrush Hill. At the top of the hill was the 120 acres owned by New Hope, the intentional community my mother had dropped everything to join the fall before. She’d met a man who called himself Lazy Elk back in Worcester, where my mother worked as a secretary and I had real friends—friends I’d known my whole life and thought I’d go on knowing, never needing to make new ones. Lazy Elk—whose real name was Mark Lubofski—swept her off her feet and talked her into going back with him to New Canaan, Vermont, where he had been living on and off for almost a year. He said a man named Gabriel was starting something big, something revolutionary there: a utopian community.
    The truth is, I was as enamored of Lazy Elk and his stories as she was. He had a kind face with deep, craggy lines around his eyes and mouth. Self-conscious about his receding hairline, he wore a wide-brimmed leather hat with a brown-and-white-striped turkey feather in the band. He took the hat off only when he went to sleep, and even then, it often lay at the foot of the bed where some other couple’s cat might sleep. He told me that the feather, which he’d found in the woods behind New Hope, was a talisman—a magic power object that helped keep his spirit free.
    So away we went, free-spirited, in his orange VW bus, expecting to find paradise. What we found instead was a few run-down buildings, a well that drew water with a rusty hand pump, a herd of goats hell-bent on destruction, and a large canvas tepee that would serve as our home for years to come. Lazy Elk had carefully left all of these details out of his descriptions of New Hope, and while my mother and I couldn’t hide our initial disappointment, we still believed that we could make a new and better life for ourselves there as we’d been promised. So it was with hope and determination that my mother filled the tepee with colorful woven rugs and clean sheets. She scrubbed the filthy glass globes of the oil lamps and trained Lazy Elk to take his muddy boots off before coming in. Our little circular home, though far from paradise, was at least bright and clean.
    At the bottom of Bullrush Hill, on the corner where our dirt road intersected with Railroad Street, which was paved, even back then, was the Griswolds’ farm. It was an old dairy farm, but they’d sold the cows off some years before. You could still smell the cow shit when it rained,