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Kossuth dead-ended at a big building called the West Side Recreation Hall. It was deserted, with a
FOR SALE BY CITY sign on the crabgrassy lawn. Surely an object of interest for any self-respecting
real estate hunter. Two houses down from it on the right, a little girl with carrot-colored hair and a
faceful of freckles was riding a bicycle with training wheels up and down an asphalt driveway. She
sang variations of the same phrase over and over as she rode: “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dingdang,
I saw the whole gang, ring-rang, I saw the whole gang. . . .”
I walked toward the Rec, as though there was nothing in the world I wanted to see more, but from
the corner of my eye I continued to track Li’l Carrot-Top. She was swaying from side to side on the
bicycle seat, trying to find out how much she could get away with before toppling over. Based on her
scabby shins, this probably wasn’t the first time she’d played the game. There was no name on the
mailbox of her house, just the number 379.
I walked to the FOR SALE sign and jotted information down on my newspaper. Then I turned
around and headed back the way I’d come. As I passed 379 Kossuth (on the far side of the street, and
pretending to be absorbed in my paper), a woman came out on the stoop. A boy was with her. He was
munching something wrapped in a napkin, and in his free hand he was holding the Daisy air rifle with
which, not so long from now, he would try to scare off his rampaging father.
“Ellen!” the woman called. “Get off that thing before you fall off! Come in and get a cookie.”
Ellen Dunning dismounted, dropped her bike on its side in the driveway, and ran into the house,
bugling: “Sing-sang, I saw the whole gang!” at the top of her considerable lungs. Her hair, a shade of
red far more unfortunate than Beverly Marsh’s, bounced like bedsprings in revolt.
The boy, who’d grow up to write a painfully composed essay that would bring me to tears, followed
her. The boy who was going to be the only surviving member of his family.
Unless I changed it. And now that I had seen them, real people living their real lives, there seemed
to be no other choice.