Newnan, Georgia—two sisters, swimming the Chattahoochee. It’s a pretty day. Alyssa Calhoun and her five-year-old sister, Kendall. They are best friends, joined at the hip.
The five-year-old drifts from shore. She can not swim against the mighty Chattahoochee. She screams.
Alyssa swims after her. They get pulled downriver. Alyssa dives beneath her sister, digs her feet in, and lifts her above her head.
When authorities find them, they are facedown in water. The youngest is alive. Alyssa Calhoun dies a hero.
She was fourteen.
Montgomery, Alabama—a teenage girl in a gas station. She places two bucks on the counter, and she is sobbing.
“I’m outta gas,” she says. “How am I gonna get home?”
The woman behind the counter comes to her. They hug. The girl presses her face into the woman’s chest.
The woman says, “Oh, honey.”
People in line pool their money to buy the girl a full tank—with change left over.
Charlotte, North Carolina—Debbie lives alone. She has no children. She is legally blind and wears thick glasses she calls “Coke-bottle lenses.”
After getting diagnosed with breast cancer, her world falls
apart. Neighbors see her come and go to treatments, riding a taxi.
She’s skin and bones.
One day, a group of neighborhood kids arrives on her porch. Boys and girls, holding platters of baked goods.
They tell her they want to do her grocery shopping, cooking, cut her lawn, dust her furniture. She agrees. They work for her. They watch television with her. They even play games and eat pizzas in her den.
One boy recalls: “We turned Miss Debbie’s into a hangout, so there’d always be people around her, keeping her smiling.”
The kids stay with her until the end.
Before Debbie passes, she remarks, “Always wanted to be a mother, those children let me kinda pretend I was.”
This morning. The first thing I see on television news is mass murder in Las Vegas.…