Manna, breath held, eyes how Elise slides her fingernail under the edge of a scab. Like this, Elise says, flicking it free, vanishing it into the yard. Manna has a hardened blister on her thumb and a rough patch on her elbow, skin she works loose as Sammie and Ami and Elise throw parts of themselves into the grass. Manna makes a show of it when it is her turn, holding her fist above the lawn like she is a Roman emperor about to make her call. I belong, I belong. Sliding her hand into her pocket, after, she waits for one of the other girls to notice; but already they've forgotten her, they're seeing only themselves.

At home, she extracts the skin fragments she has hidden, shakes them into a Tupperware that takes up a new home beneath her bed. Over dinner Manna observes her mother's alien forehead and Bambi eyes, these features unchanged since her childhood photographs, and then searches her own face in the bathroom mirror. It is hard to find the outline of a pleasing future self in her caterpillar eyebrows and tangling curls. She pulls a strand of hair loose and coils it in the Tupperware, lays herself knotted and sweating in bed.

Every day through July she joins Elise and Sammie and Ami in one of their backyards, hourly dragging their towels forward to remain in full sun, skins slick with purloined olive oil, rancid and smelling like Crayola. Summer is the best time for these changes, summer between eighth and ninth grades the best best time, and they urge each other to roll over, just a few more minutes, don't worry if it hurts. Manna's shoulders and back burst into glistening red blisters, the soles of her feet hurt to walk. Skin cancer! her mother screams. Wrinkles! But the peeling is glorious, entire strips of Manna's old self pulling away to reveal tanned skin marred only by the narrow bands of her bikini top. Each shroud of skin crumples into the Tupperware with mild shame.

They change almost in unison, in the second week of August. Elise first, with sudden waist-length blond hair, uncomfortable breasts, flushed cheeks, Chiclet teeth when she smiles. Then Sammie, Ami, and finally Manna, all of them growing legs and chests and acceptable subtle noses, a modest freckling on cheeks, lipstick-flushed mouths. Thank god, Elise says to Manna. It was gonna be so embarrassing if you didn't make it.

With a week left until the new school year, the neighborhood crowds with girls pulling at disobedient bangs and shameful knees, wishing their bodies to hurry, hurry. Sammie's mother poses them for a photograph, bookbags nestled at their feet, and all their parents get together for a barbecue and agree to the oddness of looking at these girls and thinking, I made that, and thinking, How fast they're growing up.

No, Manna thinks when she's home and can pull her Tupperware from beneath the bed, leaning close and breathing her old, childish scent of salt and cucumbers, I made this. A lumpen, awkward girl circles her plastic container, skin plushly pale. Manna tugs at a strand of the tiny girl's hair, winds it around her fingers to set aside in an envelope. Get that scab, there, she whispers, pressing her index finger to the girl's knee. She almost laughs as the girl bends over her leg and works free the dry brown mess, hands it over. This girl will do anything she wants, Manna thinks, and she instructs her to this and that, holding her breath as her miniature obeys every direction. One day she will earn her sympathy, she will look at this girl with an approximation of regret; but not today, today she only wants to gather the pieces to birth an even smaller version of herself, a procession of smaller and smaller Mannas until they are so small they vanish from sight.

She almost tells Elise about this version of herself the next morning on the bus, but there are other things to do: inspecting faces gone pimpled and greasy, noting which girls have not changed at all and remain in the front seats with their dog-eared Saddle Club paperbacks and battered clarinet cases. Manna feels sorry for them but also imagines tweezing their skin until blood pebbles to the surface, tearing their books and storing the ruined halves in her own bag. She imagines all the cruelties she could do and would do and will do, when she gets home in eight hours and pulls that container from beneath her bed. She follows Elise and Sammie and Ami off the bus, she holds her head high and resists the desire to look the horse girls in the eyes, because this is how winners act—and all of them, Elise says, are winners.

.