“It’s not that I was against praying—I prayed every night for my savvy to come and be the best savvy ever. I prayed for the power to fly or to shoot lasers from my eyes. I also prayed for Grandpa Bomba and for Gypsy when she caught the croup. It’s just that it hadn’t yet crossed my mind to pray for Poppa, and again I felt selfish and shamed and bad enough to have a house come land PLOP down on me, leaving nothing but my feet sticking out; that’s just how wicked I felt.”

Mibs stands amid a swirl of moral conflicts. In a religious community, she feels inadequately spiritual; her impatient eagerness to turn 13 and acquire her savvy conflicts with her concern for her hospitalized father; the kids at school regard her as a freak, and she therefore wishes them ill; and her sitter, Miss Rosemary, inflicts two of her children on the girl, who feels awkward around them and hasn’t yet wrapped her head around her dawning feelings for one of them, Will Junior. This moment in her life highlights the awkwardness and guilt of adolescence that impinges on the excitement and fear of entering the teen years.

“Suddenly, as I looked at those teenaged girls in their teenaged clothes, I felt younger than twelve-turning-thirteen and my special-occasion dress felt not-so-special. I realized that I had just turned into a teenager myself, and there were changes coming in my life that didn’t have anything to do with my savvy.”

On top of the sudden responsibility that comes with her newly acquired savvy, Mibs also must deal with the social complexities of no longer being a little girl. The older girls at her embarrassingly public birthday party seem not so much inspirational as threatening, and Mibs feels out of her depth now in two areas. On a day that’s supposed to be special, it’ll be hard for her to escape a large dose of humiliation.