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It’s the longest day of the year, and it’s happening again. Her name is Edith but she goes by Caroline. The first boy she ever kissed was her brother’s best friend, wearing tie-dye and fringed rawhide in 1966, somewhere back east in the late autumn with scarlet leaves and the vert, humid smell of dirt, smoke, and cold air. She never told her brother; he’d been sent off to Vietnam and shipped back in a box draped with an American flag. She’d broken a bone at thirteen falling from a stubborn horse at summer camp, so she started ninth grade
