Free Among Others by Jo Walton

easily afford one. They have a swimming pool, but not a pony, because her parents’ priorities are different. She goes skiing at Christmas, but she goes to Norway, because her parents won’t go to Germany or Switzerland.
    Julie’s parents don’t have much money at all. Her uniforms were her sister’s. They have an old car. But her sister is Head Girl, and her mother was a prefect, and won a tennis cup for Wordsworth, which is her house too. They put Julie in Wordsworth because her mother and her aunts and her sister were in Wordsworth. There’s an old black-and-white photograph of Julie’s mother and the cup in the Games Room. And the label under that picture says “The Hon. Monica Wentworth,” because Julie’s mother’s father is a viscount. Julie isn’t an Hon., but she scores higher classwise than anybody else because her mother is. It’s not just that, it’s the combination of the Hon. and the cup and the school tradition. And Julie’s not all that clever, but she’s good at games, which is a lot more important.
    There’s a fat giggly girl in the Upper Fourth who’s Lady Sarah. Her father is an earl. I think Julie would defer to her opinion, but I’m not sure. Class isn’t pure snobbery, it’s lots of things. But everyone cares about it madly. One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has. “A black one” didn’t go down too well. They couldn’t believe I didn’t know. I didn’t say I’d only seen it a couple of times and I didn’t like cars much anyway. It turns out it’s a Bentley—I wrote and asked—which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want to be able to place everyone very precisely. Of course, they quickly saw that I came nowhere—no pony, no title, and Welsh. I got points for the kind of house my father lives in—it’s fathers they’re interested in. Some of the girls have divorced parents—poor Deirdre does, for instance—but even if they live with their mother, it’s the father that counts.
    Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn’t subject to scientific analysis, and it’s not supposed to be real but it’s pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.
    W EDNESDAY 17 TH O CTOBER 1979
    When I am grown up and famous, I will never admit to having attended Arlinghurst. I’ll pretend never to have heard of it. When people ask where I was educated, I’ll leave it out.
    There are other people like me out there. There is a karass. I know there is, there can be.
    T HURSDAY 18 TH O CTOBER 1979
    This school is enough to make anyone a communist.
    I read The Communist Manifesto today—it’s very short. It would be like living on Anarres. I’ll take that over this any day.
    F RIDAY 19 TH O CTOBER 1979
    I loved Mor, but I never appreciated her enough. I never really understood how wonderful it was to always have someone to talk to who would know what you were talking about, and someone to play with who understood the kind of things I wanted to play.
    Only one more week of school before half term.
    S ATURDAY 20 TH O CTOBER 1979
    Blessed interlibrary loan. They’ve found Purposes of Love and The Last of the Wine for me!
    I took back last weeks’s eight books. I also got out five other things by authors I know and The Magus . I’ve never heard of the author (Fowles) but hey, a book about a wizard!
    I ordered twenty-eight books, from lists on title pages. The librarian, the man, looked a little taken aback, but didn’t make a fuss about it.
    It was raining stair-rods, and almost all the leaves are off the trees. I went to the bakery cafe again, because the other girls don’t go there and they’re all over the proper cafes in town. Afterwards I walked over to look at the water and the swan hissed at me. My shoes were sinking into the mud at the edge, but I went on under the trees, looking for fairies. There were one or two, but hard to see, and not inclined for conversation, which is a pity,