Little Children by Tom Perrotta Page A

that creep in the van. He’s always driving past, honking the horn, stapling those damn posters everywhere.”
    May knew that Ronnie had seen the word on his way out of the garage. He must have ridden right over it on his bike. She hoped it wouldn’t spoil his day or make him any more depressed than he already was.
    “I’ll go to the hardware store,” she said. “I can spray right over this with some black paint.”
    “I can loan you a gun if you want,” said Bertha. “Allen has three of them.”
    “I wouldn’t even know how to hold it,” said May.
    “It’s easy,” said Bertha. “I could teach you in a few minutes.”
    May shook her head. She didn’t want to think about guns. She wanted to think about the day she moved into this house. It was a long time ago—over thirty-five years. She was pregnant with Carol; Ronnie had just started school. It was the first house she’d ever owned.
    It wasn’t like she had any illusions about her life even then. She already knew that she’d married the wrong man—at the beginning he’d at least been a charming drunk, but by then the charm was all used up—and that her son wasn’t going to have an easy time of it in school. There was something about him that people didn’t like.
    But in spite of everything, she’d felt hope. They were moving into a place of their own in a nice neighborhood near a good school. Maybe things would be different there; maybe they would be happy. She stood on the front lawn in the early evening and whispered a prayer that her family would thrive on Blueberry Court, that her marriage would improve, that her children would grow up into healthy, successful adults.
    And this is what her prayer had come to: the word EVIL spray-painted in gigantic Day-Glo orange letters at the foot of her driveway, along with an arrow pointing straight to her house.
    “God help us,” she said, reaching for Bertha’s arm so she could steady herself for whatever was coming next.

Red Bikini
    JEAN MCGINNISS, THE NEWLY RETIRED SECOND-GRADE TEACHER who lived next door, was marching in place on Sarah’s welcome mat, pumping her knees and elbows like a majorette for the AARP band.
    “Ready to roll?” Jean was an energetic dumpling of a woman with a relentlessly upbeat personality that must have gone over well with the seven-year-olds. For the past several months, the two women had been going on brisk after-dinner fitness walks that had rapidly become the highlight of Sarah’s day, even if Jean’s chattiness sometimes got to her. “There’s a supernice breeze out.”
    “Could you wait a few minutes?” Sarah asked. “Richard’s in his office again.”
    By this point in the summer, both of them knew to factor in a half hour delay to accommodate Richard, who had recently begun exhibiting strange workaholic tendencies after years of pontificating about the sacred importance of leisure time and contemplative space in a fast-paced, moneygrubbing culture. Even so, Jean kept showing up on Sarah’s doorstep at seven on the dot. Her husband Tim, a retired shop teacher, was one of those we’re-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket types who worked himself into a lather watching the TV news, and Jean preferred to be out of the house when he started muttering about politicians and minorities. She set her one-and-a-half-pound dumbbells on the porch and followed Sarah inside.
    “Helloo?” Jean called out in a warbly singsong. “Is there a cute little girl in the house?”
    “She’s a terror tonight,” Sarah warned her. “I couldn’t get her to nap again.”
    “Oh dear.” Jean couldn’t have looked more sympathetic if she’d just found out that Lucy needed a kidney transplant. “Poor thing.”
    “Poor Mommy,” Sarah corrected her. “I’m the one who suffers. She’s completely unhinged. Like a character out of Dostoevsky.”
    But the little girl who poked her head out of the living room just then seemed more like a creation of Norman Rockwell than a brooding