The next wrong thing she noticed was how the world and even the parents treated her and Barry differently, based on nothing but the shape of the well-concealed area between their legs. It didn’t seem to bother anyone but Abigail that all girls were supposed to like dolls and hate bugs and all boys were supposed to like getting dirty and making noise. No one else commented about how the women always congregated in the kitchen and talked about food and diseases and babies and fashions while the men hung around the fireplace or the radio and discussed more important, interesting things like politics and history. And her comments were largely ignored.

By the time she got the position of steady catcher, Abigail had developed quite a facility for witnessing, and Biga had learned (mostly) to keep observations about the witnessing to herself. She was nine years old.

From behind the batter, she watched Pete from up the street pitch spitballs. She watched Selena flirt with Kevin, and she saw Kevin respond (Selena was fourteen and adorable, and one of Abigail’s most regular role models, but Kevin was seventeen and a sophisticate even in Selena’s eyes).

Her skill at witnessing improved, and sometimes she followed up with a bit of following around. Selena and Kevin never noticed when she snuck after them into the berry patch near the market. There she watched them suck on each other’s faces and necks and sometimes grope each others’s laps, and received impressions which she carried into her dreams.

As steady catcher, though, she witnessed most, and drew conclusions about kids. She saw that a lot of the neighborhood girls really did act scared of bugs, and apparently liked rainbows and dolls. She observed that most of the boys were more rambunctious and seemed to get a kick out of messing things up. She didn’t feel like she belonged with the girls, who tended to squeal and shriek and even bounce with joy about small things. She didn’t feel like one of the boys, either, because she didn’t care about being chosen for a team, and she had no desire to set fire to things, or to chase birds or rabbits.

Abigail felt alone outside, and Biga felt alien when she was in her family home. She kept watching. She took to writing notes. Her birthday was in January, and every year her parents gave her a diary with a little enclosing flap and a lock. Each was a different color, but they all had the year stamped on their vinyl bindings. Abigail wrote almost daily in them through 1966. After that she disdained diaries but kept journaling in a spiral notebook, until midway through the 1990s, when she switched to a computer.

She watched Selena and Kevin and sometimes just Selena or just Kevin. Witnessing Kevin led her to observe him in completely inappropriate congress with Selena’s mother, who was lovely and vivacious and exotic in their neighborhood, but who was also married and at least forty. The autumn she was twelve Abigail happened to see them doing the actual it, in the screened back porch of Selena’s house. It was a schoolday so Selena was away and her father was at work. Abigail was home recovering from a flu. She was quite well, actually, but her mother believed in keeping her home for a full twenty-four hours after her body temperature returned to normal, and the twenty-four hours wouldn’t be up for another six. Her mother left her alone while she went grocery shopping or something, and Abigail couldn’t resist a little backyard snooping. It was so easy to see into Selena’s porch next door. In fact, as Abigail realized that she was watching the shape of Selena’s mom’s butt against the screen, as Kevin pounded into her and nuzzled her so Abigail could make out the top of his head, it occurred to her that the pair was being so indiscreet as to invite discovery.