1. Sapphire is not your god.
Babs had a special silver hopscotch chain with a dangling sapphire charm, which she kept in a secret inside pocket in her book bag that only Babs and Ella and Babs’s mother (who created the pocket) knew about. She took it out every day at recess when she and Ella went to the hopscotch boards. She used the chain instead of a rock, which is what Ella used.
Above all else Ella wanted that sapphire.
Sapphire was Ella’s birthstone. She had a scrapbook of sapphire jewels—royal crowns and brooches, necklaces and bracelets from catalogs —which she kept in the drawer of her Walmart bedside table like a Gideon bible. The drawer had warped in the rain the last time Ella and her mother moved and it no longer closed completely. The scrapbook winked at Ella from within. On days Babs had dance after school and couldn’t play, Ella biked to JCPenney to look at the jewelry counter, and once, one of the younger sales women had taken out a diamond and
sapphire bracelet and laid it across Ella’s wrist, though she kept hold of an end. The weight of it was exquisite.
Babs’s hopscotch chain had been made with the extra links from a necklace Babs’s mother had shortened at the jeweler’s. Unclasped, the chain was two and a half inches long. The sapphire charm was from earrings Babs received on her ninth birthday: a silver heart split into two halves, with a sapphire in each half. On the right earring was an engraved F, for father. On the left was an M, for mother. It was the father earring that Babs lost a year later. It took Babs another year past that to convince her mother to turn the mother earring into a charm for her hopscotch chain. The day after her mother acquiesced, Babs wore the chain with its new charm wound around her middle finger, like a medieval ring.

2. Avoid using the Lord’s name in vain: substitute gosh or goodness.
Babs, being good and generous, let Ella wear the chain during math. Babs had plump fingers, though she herself wasn’t plump. Some people held their weight in their hips or belly. Babs held it in her hands and feet. Babs could wrap the chain only twice around her middle finger, while Ella could wrap it three times.
“Oh my god,” Ella whispered.
“Oh my gosh,” Babs corrected. For Babs, god was a swear word.
“Whatever. I can’t believe I’m wearing a real sapphire.”
Babs put a finger to her lips and looked around to see if anyone had heard. She’d been raised to be suspicious. Her father owned an insurance company. “I think it’s going to bring me luck,” Babs whispered. On average, Babs lost four out of five hopscotch matches. Ella was a natural athlete and naturally lucky at games.
“I don’t know,” Ella said, admiring the charm. “It’s not a star sapphire. That’s what Sir Richard Francis Burton carried that brought him all the enormous luck.”
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t know Sir Richard Francis Burton?” Ella wasn’t as smart as Babs, and the way she got around it was by finding esoteric references and exploiting her knowledge of them. “He was an explorer. No, this type of sapphire protects the owner from harm.” Ella didn’t tell Babs that the specific kind of harm it protected one from was envy.
Babs looked mildly crushed, and Ella decided she’d let her win at least two hopscotch games at recess.
“Can I wear it during lunch?” Ella asked.
Babs hesitated.
“Maybe some of my luck will rub off on it. Sapphires can absorb the wearer’s characteristics,” Ella attested. This last statement was a lie.

3. Thou shall not braid the hymnal ribbons.
Ella slept over at Babs’s house most Fridays. Once, Ella slept over on a Saturday and had to go to church with Babs and her parents on Sunday. The church was freezing. It was the first time Ella had been to church, and she’d expected it to be warm, like a library, with soft lighting. But everything about the church was hard: tiled floor, wood pews, metal cross. The only soft things were the thin satin ribbons that had been inserted into the spines of the hymnals to bookmark pages. Ella spent the long sermon braiding hers until Babs leaned over and whispered, “We’re not supposed to do that.” So Ella unbraided them with considerable resentment. Surely the church had put the ribbons there to tempt children like herself. And for once she understood what her mother meant when she said she had been set up for failure.
When Ella slept over at Babs’s, she took the bus home with Babs after school. Ella walked to school, so taking the bus was special. Looking out the bus window was like watching a movie. One Friday, a month after Babs got the sapphire charm, Babs’s mother made a special dinner of shrimp stuffed with crabmeat. It was Mr. Babs’s favorite (Mr. Babs is what Ella called Babs’s father). The next morning, she made waffles because that was Babs’s favorite. Mrs. Babs (Babs’s mother) served the waffles with real maple syrup even though real maple syrup was expensive and she knew Ella used a lot of it. Mrs. Babs went out of her way to make people feel special.
Mr. Babs worked in his home office all that morning. But when Ella’s mother came for Ella, he joined Mrs. Babs at the door to talk. He often talked to Ella’s mother when she came to the house, and Ella’s mother always came to the door instead of honking the horn from the car as she did when she got Ella from viola lessons. With the two mothers side by side, Ella saw how flat- chested Mrs. Babs was. Ella’s mother had C cups, sometimes Ds, if she was in between diets.
Ella’s mother carried her weight in her arms and boobs. Ella was praying that when she developed, she wouldn’t take after her mother. Big boobs would ruin her hopscotch game and any other sports she might want to play. She wanted to be like Mrs. Babs. The thought pricked her with only the tiniest bit of guilt. But guilt, like envy, spreads easily through the mind.
The parents talked so long that Babs and Ella went back upstairs. Even when Ella’s mother called her down again, Ella stood and waited another five minutes. On their way out, Mr. Babs put his hand on Ella’s mother, on her back below her bra strap. When Ella looked up to wave goodbye to Babs, Babs was sitting on the stairs, watching. Babs looked as though she’d eaten too many waffles.

4. Honor thy mother, even when she looks like a whore.
For Babs, Sundays were for church and homework. For Ella and her mother, Sundays were for shopping. “Just the girls,” her mother said, as though boys were an option. It had always been just the two of them. Never a father. The mall opened at noon, so Ella and her mother ate an early lunch at home to avoid buying food. Even when Ella got thirsty, they hiked to the far end of the mall, to the only public drinking fountain, at the end of a long utility hallway with fire doors.
“Never come here alone,” Ella’s mother said. “If you screamed, no one would hear you.”
Each week Ella’s mother switched up the stores they went to. One week it was evening wear at Macy’s and another it was Express. Her mother tried on armfuls of clothes but didn’t buy any of them. While sitting on the floors of the dressing rooms, Ella got the idea to make a hopscotch chain from the tiny safety pins fastened to some of the clothes her mother tried on, the pins that attached extra buttons and sweater thread or, on the fanciest of clothes, the thick designer tags. While her mother went to admire herself in the three-way mirror, Ella detached the safety pins and pocketed them, pushing the bags of buttons and thread and thick tags into the adjacent dressing rooms.
On the Sunday after Mr. Babs put his hand on Ella’s mother, Ella’s mother led Ella to the dress section at the nicest store in the mall.
“You’re back,” the sales woman said and looked at Ella with pity. She was the same sales woman who had worked the week before when Ella and her mother had been there for two hours. Just once Ella wanted someone to look at her with envy.
“Why are we here, again?” Ella whispered, her cheeks burning.
“I’ve been thinking about one of the dresses I tried on.”
Ella’s mother took a tight, low-cut black dress she tried on the week before along with two other dresses and went to the fitting rooms.
“What do you think?” her mother asked when she put the black dress on. She crossed her legs like the movie stars did while posing on the red carpet and put one hand on her hip. Then she pouted her lips and leaned forward so her cleavage deepened. The straps slipped off her shoulders. “Do I look like Marilyn Monroe?”
Ella kept her face unemotional. Her mother’s dingy white bra showed across her back where the dress dipped down. “Marilyn had blond hair.” Her mother had brown. “And she was a hussy.”
Ella’s mother straightened up in surprise, then started to laugh. “That word is about eighty years too old for you.” She opened the dressing room door and left for the three-way mirror. “I always thought she was sexier as a brunette,” she called.
The three-way mirror at this store was right at the opening to the fitting rooms, so everyone shopping in the store could see you. Ella heard someone whistle. A man. Once when Ella had come out of the mall bathroom, her mother had been talking and laughing with a man Ella didn’t know. She’d motioned for Ella to keep walking and not stop beside her. Afterward she explained. “Some men get spooked when you have a kid.”
Ella unfastened the mini safety pin on one of the remaining dresses. But this pin she left open and still in the fabric. When her mother tried the dress on, the pin scratched her on the underside of her fleshy arm. It drew tiny dots of blood.
“God dammnit.” Her mother sucked at the wound. She certainly didn’t look like Marilyn then.
Ella’s mother walked ahead of Ella out into the store and put the dresses back on their racks, but she kept the Marilyn dress. “I’m going to splurge and get this one,” she told Ella.
Ella looked around for the man she heard whistle but there were only women shopping. “For what?” For who?
Her mother didn’t answer.

5. Define kill.
Ella sometimes told people that her mother had considered an abortion when she found out she was pregnant with Ella. It was the kind of statement that made people gasp. It was almost as if Ella had survived a near-death experience. Babs hadn’t gasped, though. She launched her chain toward the number five on the board and hit it square in the middle.
“Good thing she didn’t,” Babs said. She hopped to the end of the board and turned around at the ten. “Some people consider abortion to fall under commandment five.” In preparation for confirmation classes the following year, Babs had been memorizing the ten commandments and Ella had been helping her. Babs hopped back matter-of-factly. “Your turn.”
Ella gaped. “But . . . I might not have been born!”
Babs eyed her. “Did she really consider an abortion?” Which meant she knew Ella was lying.
Ella tried for the seven but landed on the nine. “Well, sometimes I hear her telling people that she wishes she didn’t have a kid. Or how lucky her friends are not to have kids. It’s practically the same thing.”
Babs nodded then, comprehending. “My dad tells clients that the best thing they can do for their financial future is to not have kids. We cost too much in time and money.”

6. Prevent your mother from sleeping with your best friend’s father.
The next Friday Ella forgot her sleepover bag at home in the morning, so she walked home after school to get it. Ella’s mother was mixing up crab cakes when Ella walked in.
Ella’s mother and Ella spoke at the same time. “What are you doing home?”
“I got off early,” Ella’s mother said. She was wearing perfume and her hair was damp.
“I forgot my bag.” “Well, you’ll have to bike to Babs’s house. I’m having a friend for dinner.”
“What friend?” “Someone from the singles group.” Ella’s mother talked into the fridge as she set the crab cake mixture next to a bottle of wine.
Ella didn’t like it when her mother made crab cakes. The smell of crab, the unnamed brininess, lingered afterward. Ella’s mother had a roommate from South Carolina that taught her how to make them. They had both dropped out of college and had their days free. Ella wished that the roommate had taught her mother how to cook spaghetti and meatballs or chicken and dumplings or pork loin with apples—any of the things Babs’s mother cooked.
“This time I’m going to try stuffing the crab into shrimp.” Mr. Babs’s favorite dish.
Ella was slow to retrieve her bag. When she spotted the Marilyn dress on her mother’s bed, her body started its own internal game of cold and hot. The closer she got to the door to leave, the colder she felt. The closer she moved toward the bedrooms, the hotter. Neither felt right. She set her bag down. “Maybe I should stay home.” Hadn’t her mother been saying that Ella spent more time at Babs’s house than theirs?
“You should go.” Her mother’s voice was a viola string tightening. “I have plans.”
That night Mr. Babs had to work late at the office. The office, office. Not his home office. So Mrs. Babs ordered Chinese takeout for the girls and went up to her bedroom for the night.
Ella and Babs watched movies until Babs started yawning. Babs always fell asleep before Ella, so when they went to bed, Babs lent Ella her phone to play on. Ella knew the password. Ella played Fruit Ninja and Candy Crush until one a.m., when Mr. Babs finally came home.

7. Taking the blue topaz when it’s unworn and forgotten still counts as stealing.
The next morning, Mrs. Babs went to a church meeting and Mr. Babs went back to the office office, and the girls were alone. Mrs. Babs had two jewelry boxes. One that contained jewelry she wore and the other with the jewelry she didn’t wear but didn’t want to get rid of. Babs said her mother had trouble letting things go.
Babs took a wire clippers from her dad’s toolbox and carried it up to her parents’ bedroom. The bedroom was half the size of Ella’s whole apartment. Babs took out her mother’s second jewelry box and removed a gold necklace. It had a a gold pendant with a watery blue stone. Babs clipped the chain on one side of the pendant and removed the pendant. She handed it to Ella and put the chain in her pocket.
“For your hopscotch chain,” Babs said.
Ella shook her head. “I can’t take this.”
Babs closed the box and lifted it back onto the shelf. “It’s blue topaz. It’s not worth a lot.”
“It feels like stealing.”
“It’s my birthstone,” Babs confessed. “Now you have mine and I have yours.”
Ella hesitated.
“Please,” Babs said.
Ella put the pendant onto one of the safety pins in her hopscotch chain. Babs nodded. “Gold and silver jewelry is really big right now.”

8. Don’t betray your best friend, accidentally or otherwise.
Two months later, the weather softened into spring, and Mrs. Babs started planting annuals along the driveway. Ella and Babs helped. It was a Thursday, six weeks before school was out. There was a year when Ella and her mother rented a house instead of an apartment, and Ella’s mother had showed Ella how to plant petunias. Ella liked how the plants came out of the plastic pots in neat dirt cubes, and the color of the Miracle Gro water they watered them with.
“Have you done this before?” Mrs. Babs asked Ella.
Ella told Mrs. Babs about the petunias and Mrs. Babs seemed surprised that Ella’s mother planted things. “It takes a certain type of person.” After that, Mrs. Babs didn’t say much. They were just finishing when Mr. Babs came home. Ella, Babs, and Mrs. Babs all stood as he rolled up the driveway toward the garage. Ella was the only one that waved.
Babs discovered the note in the secret pocket of her book bag the following Tuesday when Ella and Babs were retrieving their hopscotch chains before lunch. Babs got a funny look on her face as she unfolded the small square of paper.
“What is it?” Ella asked.
As Babs read it, her skin turned grayish. When Babs took selfies of her and Ella on her phone, sometimes she used the silvertone filter to make them dramatic. It felt as though Ella was looking through that filter now.
“Is it from your mom?” Besides Ella and Babs, Mrs. Babs was the only other person who knew about the pocket.
Babs nodded.
“Let me see.” Ella reached for the note but Babs pulled it away.
Babs shook her head.
Ella was puzzled. Babs didn’t keep secrets from her. “Just let me read it.”
Babs folded up the note until it couldn’t be folded again. Her expression was closed.
“Girls,” the teacher said. “Line up.”
Ella grabbed for the note, grabbed again and almost got it. Babs popped the paper into her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed.
“Awesome,” Duane Aldemacher said. He was watching from the head of the line.
“Babs! What the fuck?” Ella had heard her mother say it so many times that it came out reflexively.
“That gets you detention during recess,” their teacher said.
Ella looked at Babs. Babs looked away.
After school, Babs turned left toward the car line instead of right toward the buses.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Ella said. Ella always walked Babs to her bus. She had to go past the buses to get home.
“Oh. Oops.”
Babs walked slowly, looking over her shoulder. When they stopped in front of Babs’s bus, Babs hesitated.
“What’s going on?” demanded Ella.
“Nothing!” Babs looked suddenly angry and climbed the bus stairs before Ella could ask her more. Ella, to show her own irritation, continued on. But when she reached the end of the bus line, she looked back and saw Babs walking in the opposite direction, toward the car line again. This time Babs stopped to talk to Lucy Cross, then continued on with Lucy.
Ella felt a contracting in her chest. Did Lucy and Babs have a play date after school and they were getting a ride from Lucy’s mom? And Babs didn’t want to tell Ella? Lucy was always asking Babs to be her partner in math. But Babs always said no. Maybe she’d given in.
When Ella looked again, Babs and Lucy had blended into the crowd. Ella stood rooted, not sure if she wanted to find them. But when the buses finished loading and pulling away, Ella had a clear view and felt the keen loss. They were gone.
Ella walked home as Babs had walked to the bus—slowly and looking over her shoulder, as though Babs might come after her. As though Babs would ask Lucy’s mom to change course. And as Ella neared her apartment building, a car did pull up. But it was Mr. Babs’s car, and Babs wasn’t with him.
Mr. Babs leaned across the passenger side. He was panicked, short of breath. “Have you seen Babs?”
Ella gripped her backpack straps and took a step away. “Not since school.”
“Did she get on the bus?” He undid his seatbelt so he could get closer to Ella.
Ella shook her head. “She got in the car line with Lucy Cross. I think . . . she was going to Lucy’s house.” But the urgency from Mr. Babs had Ella starting to doubt this theory.
“Ella, this is really important. Did Babs go home with her mom?”
He didn’t blink while Ella thought about the note in the secret pocket. And Babs’s gray complexion. “I don’t know.” The words felt so heavy, hard to expel.
“Ella. Please. Did my wife pick Babs up from school today?”
Ella’s head swung once, twice. “There was a note in Babs’s book bag. ”

9. Just because you were jealous of your friend’s house, it didn’t mean you wanted to live there. Ella got a letter from Babs in Vermont saying that they were staying with her grandparents and she didn’t know when she would be coming back to school. But she didn’t return. On the last day of fifth grade, the class had a pool party, which Ella didn’t attend. She and Babs had planned to wear matching swimsuits. Ella didn’t have a cell phone so she and Babs couldn’t text, and Babs didn’t like talking on the phone, so they wrote letters. Babs’s letters came posted with beautiful stamps. Ella sent hers with the flag stamps Ella’s mother got from the self-serve kiosk at the post office—ugly and oversized, with barcodes on them. For every letter Ella wrote, Babs wrote three. Babs joked that her fingers were slimming down with all the writing. Babs didn’t mention her father.
After Ella’s mother left for work in the mornings, Ella went to the empty schoolyard to play hopscotch. When she got through all ten squares in a row without messing up once, she used her mother’s OPI “Light My Sapphire” nail polish to write her initials in one of the squares. When she’d initialed all the squares, she did it again with Babs’s initials. She did this repeatedly until all the squares were filled with initials. Hers and Babs’s.
The next week, Babs wrote, “My mom says that my dad thinks he’s in love with someone else.” And that same week, Ella’s mother, trying to look serious, trying to mask her elation, breaking the news.
Ella didn’t tell Babs.
Babs’s father asked Ella to call him Ron, but Ella found a way not to call him anything. Except Mr. Babs, when he wasn’t around. Ella and her mother started spending weekends at Mr. Babs’s house—Babs’s house. Ella slept in the same day bed that she’d used for their sleepovers. Ella’s mother bought her a phone so Ella could occupy herself at night when she had insomnia. 10. If you can master number ten, you’re a shoe-in for heaven.
“Do you know that the ten commandments were probably written on sapphire?” Ella texted Babs one night. Ella had read it in a book and felt she’d been hit by a lightning bolt. “Probably” was a stretch—the book wasn’t at all certain—but Ella believed it was too perfect not to be true.
“Are you staying at my house?” Babs had texted back.
It was a yes or no question, yet Ella couldn’t figure out how to answer it. “I don’t know.”
When Ella started at the middle school in the fall without Babs, it made her physically sick.
“You’ll make new friends.” Ella’s mother said it as she took a boxed lasagna out of the freezer. But Ella had never been good at making friends, except with Babs. Her mother knew that.
“I love him, El.” Her mother turned then. And it was guilt, not elation, that she was trying to mask.
Ella biked to the mall and went in the long utility hallway with the drinking fountain. “Babs!” she cried. “Babs!” Her mother was right. No one could hear her. If she had done this the day Babs’s mother took her away, when Babs was walking with Lucy, would Babs have listened?
Ella took to hiding under Babs’s bed when Ella’s mother came looking for her on the weekends, to ask Ella if she wanted to go somewhere with her and Mr. Babs. Ella ripped a hole in the fabric that covered the underside of Babs’s box spring and climbed up into it, so her mother wouldn’t see her even if she checked under the bed. The rip had been there already. Ella simply extended it. When Babs came back, Ella would fix it.
One Sunday, when Ella was tucked up into the box spring, Ella’s hand brushed a small, black velvet pouch hanging from a nail. Inside the pouch was a sapphire earring in the shape of half a heart and engraved with an F. It was the father half to Babs’s earrings. Babs hadn’t lost it. She’d hidden it. Ella took a photo of the earring and sent it to Babs.
“Keep it. I don’t want it,” Babs responded.
Ella kept the earring in her pocket for days. Ella had wanted a sapphire. Above all else Ella had wanted a sapphire. But the weight in her pocket was unbearable.
Ella wrapped the earring securely in tissues and paper and put it in a padded envelope. She took twenty dollars that her mother had given her as emergency money and biked to the post office. She would return the father earring to Babs as if she was boxing up Mr. Babs himself.
While the postal clerk weighed the package, she asked Ella if she needed any stamps. Ella chose a sheet of flower stamps. Mr. Babs hadn’t watered the annuals that Mrs. Babs had planted along the driveway that spring and they had dried up.

After.
Ella’s mother appeared in several radio ads for Mr. Babs’s insurance company, but they failed so miserably that he stopped putting her in them. It didn’t stop him from marrying her.

When Ella graduated from high school, she went to college in Vermont. She and Babs were roommates and Mrs. Babs taught Ella how to cook.

Ella’s mother never learned how to cook, but she was happy. And Ella didn’t envy her for it.