If any one of us had seen a stray dog wandering down the middle of a busy street, would any of us have been able to look away from that dog? How many minutes, seconds, would have passed by before one of us would have run out into the middle of the street, waving our arms and shouting to hold up the traffic, and have picked up that dog and carried it, or grabbed it by the collar and dragged it if was too big to carry -- that dog would have to bite off one of my fingers to keep me from dragging it -- back to the intersection, and have taken it to University Town Center's lost-and-found department, and then would have stood there behind the counter at the lost-and-found department while someone announced on the intercom, "Will the owner of the brown-and-white collie please come to the lost-and-found department?" just to make sure that the announcement was made, that there was at least one other person on Earth who cared whether or not this dog lived or died? That dog would have to be growling and foaming at the mouth like the reincarnation of motherfucking Cujo to keep me away from it.

But nobody reported Raggedy Darcy to lost-and-found. Some of us got on the bus with her, and every single one of us was thinking about her, and every single person who was at one of the bus stops in front of UTC that afternoon still remembers her, and if any of them are reading this, they're saying to themselves, "No, her hair wasn't blue, it was blond," or, "She was wearing a checkered dress, not a polka-dot dress," or, "The dress didn't have a pattern; it was just a white dress. And her hair was done in a ponytail, not a pair of pigtails," or, "She wasn't wearing a dress. She wore a white dress shirt and a blue-and-white checkered skirt. It looked like a schoolgirl's uniform. She didn't look anything at all like Raggedy Ann."