136 David Blackmore Sunshine Family Dolls I tramp down our muddy dirt road with fifteen boys I barely know, all of us on our way from the school bus stop on Route 321 to my ninth birthday party. This will be my first birthday since we moved to Kane, Pennsylvania, and I am certain that it can’t be as good as my eighth birthday party a year earlier, when I talked my parents into throwing me a surprise birthday party. Always willfully naïve, I had fallen for their unlikely line that we couldn’t afford a party that year and reacted with genuine surprise when all my friends from the neighborhood gathered to celebrate. But that had been back when we still lived in the intimate suburb of Thornburg, a few miles out from downtown Pisburgh. Now we are three hours north in the boonies of Kane, living on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest in a solid clapboard so architecturally uninspired that there isn’t even a name for its dull style; it’s just a plain old house. And the house is surrounded in all directions by cold, wet mud: in the dirt road out front, along the gurgling brook that cuts through the deep woods, in the swamp that spreads east across the flat boom of our small hollow. A delicate and sensitive boy, I have not been happy about this move so far. I miss our rambling old Craftsman house in Thornburg, just down the hill from the park where I’d meet up with friends I’d known since nursery school. I also miss our frequent trips into the city, exiting the Fort Pi Tunnel to the sudden, magical vista of the Golden Triangle’s metallic towers, and then down the river and up the hill to Oakland, where we could walk among the bones of ancient dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and select that week’s new books to borrow at the Carnegie Library. Because we moved to Kane just a couple of months ago—and maybe because I am turning into more and more of a geek, feeling totally out of place in this muddy wilderness—I don’t have a clear group of friends big enough to populate a respectable birthday party. So my mom invites all fifteen boys in Mrs. Anundson’s fourth-grade class. Inviting all the boys in the class is a smart idea on my mother’s part, but it makes me more than a bit nervous. Inviting all of them means including even the tough ones and the mean ones, the ones who are not at all sure about this bookish, unmasculine new boy from the big city. But all fifteen come, piling onto my school bus at 3:00 p.m. for the half-hour ride and then slugging down the muddy road with me to the house. Things start off OK at the house. Some of the boys think it’s cool that I live this deep in the woods and say they might like to come back some time when it’s warmer and there’s more sunlight. My mom, who will eventually become a teacher at the elementary school we all aend, has all sorts of fun