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Death, a stranger in any child's cosmos, seems grossly alien in Hilary's. She lives in a pale-yellow house a block from the ocean in Avon-by-the-Sea, N.J. The tiny town is a summer beach destination--Ginny met George on the boardwalk when she was just 17 and both were working menial hotel jobs--with a year-round population of slightly more than 2,000. Yet even in the off-season Avon retains a certain lazy, carefree air. Sweeping front porches serve as social hubs. Traffic grinds to a halt so that ducks can meander across the street. Underemployed policemen ride around on bicycles and hand out "citations" for good behavior, redeemable for free sugar cones at Beach Plum Homemade Ice Cream.
Hilary has always been one of the most frequent offenders. She began life as "the miracle baby"--Ginny tried for nearly a decade to get pregnant and finally succeeded shortly after her 36th birthday. Hilary is tall for her age and trim, with fair, freckled skin and a froth of red curls so striking that strangers stop her on the street for her autograph, insisting that she must be an actress from a Broadway production of Annie. This year, as in every other, she earned straight A's. She competes in five sports (ranking statewide in swimming), plays the piano and, in her free time, strings rosaries to give to the poor. "My life was totally set," she says. As a grownup, she planned on a two-pronged career: she would work for several decades as a patent attorney and then cash out at age 50 and teach in an inner-city elementary school. She would then move back into her childhood home because by that time, "my parents would be very old, and old people live in small houses without steps." They would have to buy the single-story ranch house next door.
And here's the true miracle: she is thoroughly unaffected. She speaks up in class but doesn't flaunt her knowledge. She has the rare ability, unsettling in an adolescent, to bob among different social circles, equally at ease with the bookworms, the jocks and the special-needs kids and, like many other only children, with adults as well. "Often when I'm around her, she's so mature that I completely forget and hear myself talking like she's one of my girlfriends," says family friend Maureen Farrington. But in other ways, Hilary is refreshingly juvenile. Her room is an absolute disaster zone, the carpet barely visible among empty ginger-ale cans and discarded Old Navy outfits. She moans about her braces; when she's excited about something, she jumps up and down and tugs on the arm of the nearest adult.
"There's absolutely nothing of me in her," jokes Ginny. Then she pauses and twirls her own schoolgirl red curls. "O.K., these came from me, but in every other way, she is a patch off her father." Indeed, the two were so stunningly similar in physique and temperament that her father's friends find it a little spooky to be in her presence. Both were lean and lanky with broad shoulders built for the butterfly stroke; and both whip-smart but very tightly wound. Though students couldn't enter the science fair until the sixth grade, George and Hilary had spent the past year scouring the Internet for the perfect project. "For a lot of years, I was basically just the team manager for the two of them and stood in the background and watched," Ginny says.