How did that happen? No clue. And it doesn't matter, as Maddy told Dolly.

This story is essentially told by Dolly from her point of view using her language skills as they exist at that point in the story. Aside from dialogue spoken by other characters, and proper nouns such as Dolly, Charlie, Greg, and Maddy, Dolly uses her one hundredth unique word “smile” just before the midpoint of the story. Her vocabulary is only sixty-two words when she first encounters Charlie and Omar. This is also the first time there’s dialogue that she isn’t “thinking”.

The only real difficulty I had with this story was the scene transitions. Dolly isn’t one to describe stuff she isn’t interacting with. The section breaks, *****, do a lot of heavy lifting for that. It also took several passes to make sure everything was in present tense. Dolls are very of-the-moment creatures.