she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark. How else could she have stayed resolutely wedded to the ordinary, to my father, to the carefully ordained and unchanging routines of Manchester-by-the-Sea?
And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have—that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I’ve learned it’s a mistake to reveal her at all.
So, from our ordinary family in our ordinary house, a center-entrance colonial, with its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended yew hedges nibbling at the windows, I made my way out into the ordinary world, to the local elementary school, the local middle school, the local high school. I was popular enough, universally liked by the girls, even liked, when noticed, by the boys, though not in a romantic way. I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.
Education was different then, and I was good at it, and so I skipped grade nine, went straight from eight to ten, which was socially a little tough at first and sealed my fate as a disastrous math student—I never learned the quadratic formula, and other important tips from ninth-grade math; just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes in how to navigate a school dance. At the time, though, I wasn’t embarrassed about any of this: not embarrassed to be thrown, sink or swim, into the second year of high school, without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up, or even a list of the names of my new classmates, all of whom knew one another, and some of whom knew me as their little sister’s friend. No, I was proud, because I knew my parents were proud, because it was an elevation, and a revelation of the fact that I was special. I’d long suspected it, and now I knew for sure: I was destined.
When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.
When you look at the boy, Josh, who skipped the grade alongside you, and you see him wiping his nose upon his sleeve, and note his physical scrawniness, his chin’s bloom of acne, next to the other tenth-grade boys with broader chests and clear, square jaws, when you observe that he still takes his lunch with his old ninth-grade friends—all of them boys in black T-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say KISS or AC/DC, all