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help, was perfectly good,” Sunny reminded her sister.
    Heather gave her a knowing look. Technically, the dress had been well made, and Sunny had executed even the tricky parts—the darts in the bodice, the cutting of the fabric so the pattern was consistent—with finesse. But Heather seemed to have been born knowing things that escaped Sunny. Heather would never have chosen the heavy, almost muslinlike material, with its motif of ears of corn in vertical rows. In hindsight the teasing that Sunny had suffered was so predictable. Corny, cornpone, corn-fed. But she had felt so pretty getting ready that morning, her hair pulled into side ponytails and tied with green ribbons, so they played off the shiny gold ears encased in green stalks. Even theirmother thought she looked nice. But the moment she stepped onto the bus—even before the shouts of “Cornball!” and “Corn-fed!”—Sunny knew that the dress was yet another mistake on her part. It didn’t help that the darts, while properly executed, made the bodice pull tightly across the breasts that she wasn’t quite ready to have.
    â€œAnyway, once we get there, you’re not to tag along after me. Dad said he’d pick us up at five-thirty, outside. I’ll meet you at Karmelkorn at twenty after.”
    â€œAnd you’ll buy me one?”
    â€œWhat? Sure. Karmelkorn or Baskin-Robbins, if you like. Whatever you want. In fact, I’ll give you five dollars if you’ll promise to leave me alone.”
    â€œFive whole dollars?” Heather loved money, money and things, but she hated to part with money in order to have things. Their parents worried about this streak in her, Sunny knew. They tried to pass it off as a joke, calling her the little magpie, saying her eye was drawn to anything shiny and new, which she then took home to her nest. But this wasn’t Bethany behavior, and Sunny knew that her parents worried about Heather. “She has an eye too soon made glad,” their father said gloomily, paraphrasing some poem about a duchess.
    â€œYes, so you won’t have to dip into your savings at all.” And, Sunny thought, so you won’t open your metal card box and see I’ve had to borrow money from you, so the five dollars I’m giving you is actually yours. Heather wasn’t the only person who sneaked into other people’s rooms and poked at things that she wasn’t supposed to touch. Sunny had even figured out the pattern of the rubber bands that Heather used on the box.
    Served her right, for being a spy.

CHAPTER 7
    T here was a vending machine in the motel room, actually in it, not down the hall or tucked away in a breezeway. Miriam lingered in front of the machine, testing the knobs, scooping her fingers in the change bin the way a child might. The wrappers on the candy bars looked a little faded. Given that it cost seventy-five cents to purchase a Zagnut or a Clark bar that could be had for thirty-five cents in the machine back in the lobby, cheaper still at the grocery store across the street, it had probably been a while since anyone had tried to justify the novelty of an in-room candy bar purchase. Still, how Sunny and Heather would have gloried in this machine, so many forbidden marvels crammed into one silvery box—sugary candy sold at exorbitant prices, yours for a quick yank on a handle. If they had ever stayed in such a motel—unlikely enough in itself, given Dave’s preference for motor courts and campsites, “real” places, as he called them, which also had the virtue of being cheap places—the girls would have pleaded for coins to feed the machine as Dave grumped and harrumphed about the wastefulness of it. Miriam would have caved, and he would haveremonstrated with her for not presenting a united front, then been cold and distant for the rest of the evening.
    What else would happen on this fantasy trip to a motel not even five miles from