Free Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline Page A

salesclerks, most of them high-school kids who, through bad luck or bad planning, got stuck in Bangor for the summer. As she watches them snap their gum, surreptitiously yanking on their clothing as they check their reflections in the mirrored columns, she is struck by how young they seem, how unsure and self-conscious. Was she that way? When she was in high school she had felt so old.
Thinking back, the elements of her life were so simple then. She got up early on cold mornings, showered quickly in a steam-filled bathroom, layered herself with warm clothing, shoveled something sugary into her mouth on her way out the door, and headed off to school with an L. L. Bean backpack full of books, half-finished papers, and notebooks covered with doodles. For a long time it seemed that there were infinite amounts of time to spend. After an hour or two of some after-school activity and an hour or two of homework (which could always be finished secretly in the bathroom late at night, or in the early-morning hours before school, or even, in a pinch, in the cafeteria at lunch), the rest of the day stretched ahead like a long, flat road. There were usually some household chores to do, and then dinner, and then the freedom of the evening, unasked for and unappreciated, would be frittered away.
There was a time when Kathryn would spend whole evenings on the phone with Jennifer, methodically removing the shell-colored nail polish from her toes and repainting them, each one a different color, as they went over the day’s minute details, obsessing over a glance, a close call, a mortifying moment at her locker. She spent entire afternoons in her bedroom doing nothing, as she explained when her mother asked what she was up to: “Nothing, Mom.” “Don’t be evasive with me, Kathryn,” her mother said. But it wasn’t evasion, it was the truth; she was doing no one thing—not reading, not cleaning, not using her time efficiently, not planning ahead.
In high school Kathryn and her friends had existed in a netherworld between the bad kids and the good kids, the ones who skipped schooland got in serious trouble and the ones who became class monitor and teacher’s pet. They were courteous but irreverent, skeptical about ritual but usually game enough to participate in school-related functions like pep rallies and fund-raising drives. As class president, Will was the one most involved in activities; his presence at various events actually mattered. The others were happy to go along, as long as it was generally understood and agreed that none of it had to be taken too seriously. There were things that mattered, to be sure; it was just that few of these things were part of their lives at Bangor High.
Like most of her friends, Kathryn felt that the adults in her life existed around her, setting limits, asking questions, prying. Kathryn moved through each day as if around an obstacle course, ducking inopportune questions, ignoring unwanted advice, sliding in just under curfew. She couldn’t imagine how she might communicate with these people, even if she wanted to. Her parents talked about responsibility and limits and planning for the future. They wanted her to save time, to be aware of time, to use her time wisely. This concept was meaningless to her. Why worry about time when there was so much of it, when it was as plentiful as air? She wanted to squander time, to use up great gobs of it. As far as she was concerned, everything happened too slowly.
High school always seemed to Kathryn like a way station for real life, a place where nothing meaningful could happen and there was no point in even trying. She took school seriously; she fretted over tests and made decent grades, but she never quite believed that anything she learned in high school would spill over into Real Life—that mythical time in the future, after college, when she would be an adult in the world. Of course, she was as terrified of leaving home as she was at the prospect of