My earliest friend was a girl named Mollie, who I met at the beach the summer I turned three. She came and stood by my blanket and smiled down at me. She looked huge, framed by the sun from where I sat squinting up at her: a gigantically tall four-year-old with strawberry blond hair snapping in the wind.
“C’mon,” she said, “let’s go.”
And then she turned and raced down to the water’s edge, and, as I remember it, I just stood up, left my family and all my possessions—my sandy peanut butter sandwich, my green plastic pail, and my mother—and ran barefoot down to the edge of the water, right down to the edge of my world.
