Ginger had never thought there was anything particularly unusual about herself until the day she began noticing all the ways she was different. It started when some of the girls decided they were too old to play in the dirt. Ginger happened to be sitting in the dirt at the time, building a tiny town from sticks, stones, and pieces of dried bark.

"That's for little kids," one of them said. Ginger looked down at her town. She had been having a perfectly good time until then.

The next day, everyone seemed interested in jumping rope. Ginger wasn't very good at jumping rope. The rope caught her ankles, smacked the back of her legs, and once became tangled around both feet so thoroughly that she fell over. Everyone laughed. Ginger laughed too, but hers wasn't quite the same kind of laugh.

After that, Ginger started paying attention. The other girls didn't collect interesting rocks in their pockets. They didn't climb onto the old stone wall just to see what the world looked like from up there. They didn't lie on their stomachs beside an anthill to see where the ants were going. Ginger did all of those things.

So she decided she would stop.

For several days, Ginger worked very hard at being more like everyone else. She left interesting rocks where she found them. When she saw a lizard disappear beneath the porch, she pretended she hadn't noticed. She practiced jumping rope even though she would rather have been wandering along the dusty paths beyond the yard. When the other girls said something was silly, Ginger agreed—even when she secretly thought it wasn't silly at all.

She even tried not asking so many questions.

That was the hardest part.

At supper, Ginger nearly asked why corn had little strings inside the husks, but she stopped herself. The next morning, she wondered why the moon was still in the sky when the sun was already up, but she kept that question too. By the end of the week, Ginger had so many unanswered questions inside her that it felt as though they were bumping into one another.

One afternoon, Ginger was walking with the other children when something flashed green beside the path. She stopped. Crossing the dirt was a line of tiny beetles, their backs shining green and blue whenever the sunlight touched them.

Ginger stared. The other children kept walking. She wanted to crouch down. She wanted to know where the beetles were going. She wanted to know why they were all traveling in the same direction and why their backs looked dull brown in the shade but sparkled like jewels in the sun.

Ginger took one step after the others.

Then she stopped.

She looked at the children ahead of her.

She looked at the beetles.

"Oh, forget it," she muttered.

Down she went onto her knees.

The beetles marched beneath a clump of grass, around a stone, and toward an old fallen branch. Ginger followed them, crawling through the dirt and pushing her red hair out of her eyes.

"Where are you going?" she whispered.

One beetle disappeared beneath the branch. Then another. Then another. Ginger flattened herself against the ground and peeked underneath.

"What are you doing?"

Ginger looked over her shoulder. One of the girls was standing behind her.

"Following beetles."

"Why?"

"I don't know yet."

The girl stared at Ginger for a moment.

Then she crouched down.

Another child came back to see what they were doing. Then another. Before long, four children were kneeling in the dirt around the old branch while Ginger explained everything she had noticed.

"They change color in the sunlight," she said. "And they're all going under there. But I don't know why."

"Maybe they live there," someone said.

"Maybe there's food," said another.

"Maybe they're hiding something," Ginger said.

That possibility was much more interesting.

For the next half hour, nobody jumped rope. They searched around the branch, looked beneath stones, discovered a spiderweb stretched between two weeds, and argued about whether one particularly strange pebble looked more like a potato or a nose.

They never discovered what the beetles were doing.

Ginger didn't mind.

When she finally stood up, her knees were covered with dirt and there was a little twig tangled in her hair. She brushed herself off and reached into her pocket.

Three smooth stones.

A curled piece of bark.

One acorn cap.

And a tiny piece of blue glass that had been worn smooth around the edges.

Ginger smiled.

She had missed having things in her pockets.

The next day, when the other girls brought out the jump rope, Ginger joined them for a while. She tripped twice and laughed both times. Then she noticed an enormous cloud shaped exactly like a dragon sailing across the bright afternoon sky.

"Look!" Ginger shouted, pointing upward.

One girl looked up.

"I think it looks like a horse."

"It does not."

"It does too."

Within seconds, everyone was arguing about the cloud.

Ginger lay back in the grass and grinned. Her hair was messy. Her knees were scratched. Her pockets were full again, and she had already asked more questions that morning than she had during the entire week before.

Ginger hadn't become braver because she stopped caring what other people thought. Sometimes she still cared.

She had simply discovered that pretending not to be Ginger was much harder than being Ginger.

And she wasn't going to do that anymore.