Tenth of December

Alison Pope is a teenage girl who is left home alone in “Victory Lap.” She is prone to flights of fancy and beginning to think about boys, and she has pity for her neighbor Kyle Boot for his strict parents and lack of popularity. She is happy with her life and her community and believes that people are essentially good; this belief is put to the test when she is nearly kidnapped. After she is rescued by Kyle and calls the police, she realizes what will happen to Kyle and to her kidnapper if Kyle goes through with killing the man, she comes to the understanding that violence harms both the perpetrator and the victim. She is haunted by her experience, but her parents help her work through the trauma she has experienced by reminding her that her and Kyle’s actions kept a bad situation from being much worse. As the first character introduced in the collection, Alison embodies Saunders’s ideal of a person who manages to empathize with others, even and especially when this is most difficult. Alison’s rich inner monologue and imagined play suggests that empathy is a similarly imaginative act, requiring one to consider circumstances and personalities outside one’s own immediate experience.