Wanda Petronski sat in the corner of the classroom, in the seat where the rough boys and the children nobody expected much from usually sat. She was quiet. She had a hard-to-say Polish name that the other children liked to laugh at. And every single day she wore the same dress: a faded blue one, clean but wrinkled, a little crooked at the hem. Wanda lived far from school, up on Boggins Heights, where the poorest families in town got by on very little. Most mornings she walked down the muddy hill alone. At school she kept to herself, and the truth is that on the days she was absent, hardly anyone noticed she was gone. Then one bright morning, everything changed. As a crowd of girls admired a new red dress, Peggy, the prettiest and best-liked girl in the class, turned to Wanda and asked, in a voice just a little too sweet, how many dresses she had. Wanda said she had a hundred. A hundred dresses, all lined up in her closet, in every colour you could think of. The girls knew this could not be true, not for a girl in one faded blue dress. And so, without quite deciding to, they began a game: every day they would stop Wanda and ask her about the hundred dresses, just to hear her answer and to laugh.