Wally Lamb

In the school yard, I leaned against the cool brick building and rigged a tight smile on my face to show everyone how perfectly happy I was not to have anyone to talk to.

She always referred to me as "the girl" when talking to her friends, always with that drop in her voice, as if I were a monster kept under wraps—Mr. Rochester's crazy attic wife in Jane Eyre. I'd written on one of Mrs. Bronstein's essay tests once that I liked that lunatic wife better than I liked boring Jane. Mrs. Bronstein had handed the comment back circled with a string of question marks.

Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack-bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.

Maybe you could come back to life after you'd been dead to it. Or pick a new person to become—just shuck your old self, let who you used to be die a quiet death. It was funny how my high-school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.

Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.—relaxation such a well-deserved reward that I began not to have the heart to set the alarm on myself for early-morning class.

I tried to imagine what Grandma would say if I killed myself—what she'd feel. A mortal sin: that's what she'd call it. For the rest of her life, she'd pray for me, imagine me roasting in hell like a rotisserie chicken at First National. Only I wouldn't be in hell. I'd be in dirt, rotting away like Ma, because God was something people made up—a lie people told themselves. I looked inside the bag. Two of the lemon ones were already gone. My mouth burned with sweetness.

The road went on and on, but I didn't mind. I felt energized, ready for anything. Fat girl on a skinny road, I thought. It struck me as hilarious. I knew this was the way. I followed the sound of the ocean.

"If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them." That was a poster in the kitchen at the outreach house. Maybe I'd peel it off the wall and sneak it with me when I left.

What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

You could show a drive-in movie on that forehead of hers, I thought.