An unnamed woman recalls a memory of wandering around an old-fashioned carnival as a young girl with her younger sister, Katie, and a boy the same age as Katie named Darin. Darin is the son of Dot, who is the sisters' babysitter. Dot never did much babysitting, often leaving the three of them to their own devices while she ran errands or took naps. The one thing Dot did well was make the best toast ever. The woman speculates that perhaps she didn't complain to her mother that Dot was not babysitting her and Katie because they wanted to keep eating this toast. This months-long charade ultimately ended on that day of the carnival, when the sisters were separated from Darin in the crowd. Darin is slow and stubborn, prone to bloody noses, constantly salivating, and has a pale, puffy face. The sisters do not like him much and go out of their way to make him feel excluded. Because of Darin, the woman is reminded of a boy named Bruce she met a few years later in high school. They were both "obviously tragic boys...unattractive and, it seemed clear, insufficiently loved." The woman had grown popular and attractive in high school, catching the attention of Bruce as well as boys with high social status (but whose attention she never particularly enjoyed). She no longer remembers those guys but Bruce sticks out in her mind for the miniscule notes covered in tiny handwriting he used to pass her during class. Bruce was constantly made fun of for the way he looked and the way items in his possession malfunctioned. The woman's own childhood had been unhappy and generally felt "dark and airless." Dot would threaten her son with spankings and the sisters would get similar threats at home—but Dot would make good on her promises while the sisters did not receive such harsh punishments. One day, Darin is unable to sit down while the three of them watched television. He slowly tells the sisters that blood from the welts on his behind had caused fabric to stick to his skin, causing excruciating pain. The sisters help Darin with his predicament and a newfound camaraderie emerged between them. The woman makes toast for the three of them that day instead of waiting for Dot to do so. The three children felt more like a team after that day. They snuck out of the house to a neighborhood playground and raced home when they saw Dot's car approaching. From here, the woman wonders how Dot must have been feeling in managing her own life at that moment. The woman observes that although all of the adults in her life struck her as unchanging and opaque characters, all of them must have had hopes, desires, and improvements they would have liked to make in their own lives that she just had no idea about. She ruminates about how childhood traumas can impact a person's adult life. The woman's memories of arriving at the carnival are fuzzy. The three of them held hands and walked through the dense crowd with a feeling of unnatural ease. There existed a stall that promised to showcase the "Ugliest Man in the World," and the woman asks herself if this was the point at which she let go of Darin's hand or if they were jostled apart by the crowd. When the sisters returned home, their mother and Dot were fighting with Darin (already having returned home) crouched in the corner of the living room. Their mother blamed Dot for not babysitting and Dot blamed the sisters for losing Darin. The woman thinks about these memories sometimes, as remembering these bits of her childhood help her be more aware of the dark violence she still holds, and that is rooted, inside her. She stays aware and constantly tries to root out the violence for her own sake and for the sake of her family. She wonders what memories her children will take with them into their own adulthoods and what experiences will consist of their memories. She makes toast for them, hard, crunchy, and with honey and butter. But there is no telling which memories evolve and stick around, year after year, into a form of love.