Finding the Fourth Wheel
Prologue: Why Do They Always Go for the Skinny Girls?
Two little girls pulled a huge toy car out of a garage, no adult in sight. One was pale and a chubby, the other deeply tanned and slender. They wore identical outfits – ill-fitting pink t-shirts with pink bike shorts and pink light-up sneakers. The chubby girl paused a moment to tug at her t-shirt and the other called for her to keep up. Giggling maniacally, they dragged the car out onto the sidewalk and clambered inside.
The tanned girl had received the Barbie DreamCar for her birthday, after both girls had spent the summer begging for it. So obviously, she got rights to be the first driver. The two jammed their matching cats-eye sunglasses on their faces and she pressed the gas, sending them straight into the hedge. They dissolved into new fits of giggles.
Once out of the hedge, they managed to drive down the sidewalk in a more or less straight line. They kept driving, driving, driving, past the mailbox that marked how far away from their houses they were allowed to go. But neither of their mothers were watching that day, because both had assumed that the other girl's mother was watching them.
And then, in a moment that the tanned girl would later say was totally fate, a little boy streaked across their path. He raced after a basketball as it rolled towards the street, his sneakered feet smacking loudly against the asphalt. Both girls screamed in terror and the car went into a hedge for a second time.
He helped them pull the car out of the hedge and introduced himself.
Keith.
A perfect name for a perfect boy. The girls watched him with wide eyes. He was the peak of eight-year-old perfection – tan, adorably freckled, just a little bit taller than them. But the more they talked to him, the more it became clear that he was more interested in one girl than the other.