Freedom

“I see you more than practically anybody. I love seeing you.”

“Then why won’t you stay here this summer? Don’t you trust me?”

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t figure out why you’d rather work for your dad. He did not take care of you, he did not protect you, and I will. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and I do.”

It was true that Patty’s spirits sagged at the thought of going home, but it seemed necessary to punish herself for eating hash brownies. Her dad had also been making an effort with her, sending her actual handwritten letters (“We miss you on the te

In one letter Eliza wrote, I think we need to make rules for each other for protection and self-improvement. Patty was skeptical about this but wrote back with three rules for her friend. No smoking before di

“So, how’s life in Mi

You might think that Patty, being a trained competitor and three and a half years older than the sister (though only two years ahead of her in school), would have developed ways of handling the sister’s demeaning silliness. But there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart-she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness. The sister also really was Creative and therefore skilled at coming up with unexpected ways to render Patty speechless.

“Why do you always talk to me in that weird voice?” was Patty’s current best defense.

“I was just asking you about life in good old Mi

“You cackle, is what you do. It’s like a cackle.”

This was met with a glittery-eyed silence. Then: “It’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”

“Please just go away.”

“Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No. Although I did make a really great friend.”

“You mean the one who’s sending you all the letters? Is she a jock?”

“No. She’s a poet.”

“Wow.” The sister seemed a tiny bit interested. “What’s her name?”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza Doolittle. She sure does write an awful lot of letters. Are you positive she’s not your girlfriend?”

“She’s a writer, OK? A really interesting writer.”

“One hears whispers from the locker room, is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name.”

“You’re so disgusting,” Patty said. “She has like three different boyfriends, she’s very cool.”

“Brainerd, Mi

The following fall, back at school, Patty met the boy named Carter who became, for want of a better word, her first boyfriend. It now seems to the autobiographer anything but accidental that she met him immediately after she’d obeyed Eliza’s third rule and told her that a guy she knew from the gym, a sophomore from the wrestling team, had asked her out to di

“I’m sorry, but you’re still on probation guywise,” Eliza said. “You thought the person who raped you was a nice guy.”

“I’m not sure I actually formed that particular thought. I was just excited he was interested in me.”

“Well, and now here’s somebody else who’s interested in you.”

“Yes, but I’m sober.”

They’d compromised by agreeing that Patty would go to Eliza’s off-campus room (her reward from her parents for having worked a summer job) directly after di

Patty faltered in the doorway. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone?”

“Oh God, no no no no no, we want you here,” Eliza cried. “Carter and I are ancient history, aren’t we?”

“Very ancient,” Carter said with dignity and, Patty thought later, mild irritation. He swung his feet down onto the floor.

“An extinct volcano,” Eliza said as she leaped up to make introductions. Patty had never seen her friend with a boy before, and she was struck by how altered her personality was-her face was flushed, she stumbled over words and steadily emitted somewhat artificial giggles. It seemed to have slipped her mind that Patty had come over to be debriefed about her di

“No, thank you,” Patty said.

“But it’s Saturday night,” Eliza said.

Patty wanted to point out that the rules did not oblige her to drink on Saturday, but in Carter’s presence she got an objective glimpse of how odd these rules of Eliza’s were, and how odd it was, for that matter, that she had to report to Eliza on her di