We both laughed and I sort of jumped and twirled in the air with the giant stick and it was the lightness of it that kept me. The way that girls laugh. The way games start. The way we showed off to each other in the woods, and never a guy around until suddenly they were around all the time. We had spitting contests, cursing contests, stealing contests, cartwheel contests and the world was ours. We had frilly skirts but mostly mud-marked shorts and skinned knees and tangles in our hair that sometimes we combed for each other. We had secrets and secret language and secret games and a lightness, a buoyancy that carried us. If you asked me then, that day, if I really wanted to marry a king, I would have said only if I can live with all my friends in my castle.