I say, almost gasping. It is a Monday in November, and Annie Pat Masterson and I are eating lunch at school. We are outside, my favorite place in the world to be. Annie Pat and I are getting ready for Thanksgiving—ten days away, Mom says—by stretching our stomachs. You have to do this from the inside, with food, because outside stretching doesn’t work. We already tried that. “I know you’re stuffed. But want another apple anyway?” Annie Pat asks—gloomily, because she is stuffed, too. She holds one out on the flat of her hand, as if I were a horse. Her red pigtails are usually bouncy, but today they droop. “Sure,” I lie. “We’re in training for Thanksgiving, aren’t we?” Annie Pat nods. “Last year, I was too full after dinner to eat any pumpkin pie,” I continue. “And there wasn’t any left over the next day, either. So I missed my pumpkin-pie chance for the whole entire year.” “I ate a piece of pie,” Annie Pat tells me, remembering. “But I could barely even taste it, my mouth was so worn out from eating turkey.”
