She did not sit down the way children sit down.

She went down onto the tile with her back against the wall and pulled her knees up and put both arms around her middle, and she was gray around the mouth in a way I did not like at all.

“It hurts,” she said.

“Charlotte, it really hurts.”

I took one step toward her.

And the first girl — Charlotte, seven years old, four feet nothing, soaked to the skin — moved sideways and put herself directly between me and her sister.