Summary

In Chapter 3, August's father gave her and her brother increasing freedom to go out of the apartment after the accident, until they were free. August often roamed the neighborhood looking for signs of her mother, who she had begun to realize must be changed by now. When they began school that fall, the girls were not her friends, but she loved to watch them and learned who they are by the sound of their voices and they way they move. She still believed the girls were impervious to pain and did not have any "ghost mother" in their pasts (36).

On the day they finally became friends, Sylvia approached August and asked what she saw when she looked at the three of them. "I see everything," August told her (37), and when they asked if she was the one without a mother, she denied it. The...