Free You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen Page B

you know it might be best. And then I felt really arrogant to think that I could judge somebody’s life like that, to basically say they’re better off dead. But some I really kind of loved, and even if they were miserable I wanted to keep them around.” She shrugged. “Don’t forget I didn’t work there very long. Not even a year. My parents made me.”
    “They did? I thought you chose it. You know, because of your grandmother.”
    “Well, it was that or take part in some repellent Pro-Life church campaign. Not much of a choice. It wasn’t like I was on fire to be with the elderly instead of out smoking pot with you and Steve Brearly.”
    “Huh. I remembered it totally differently. Well, let’s forget I brought it up,” I said. I closed my eyes. “You know, it’s really freaking hot in here.”
    “I know. I think I saw another roach in the kitchen too.” She peered into the blank television screen and lined her other eye. “They really threw you in today, huh?”
    “Supposedly it’s better this way.”
    “You know, at least she’s married,” Jill said. Her voice was a monotone with concentration, the skin of her eyelids stretched between the V of her fingertips. How was I ever going to do that to Kate? “I’m sure you won’t have to shower her too often, so don’t ditch this job too because of one hard day.”
    “I’m not ditching anything,” I said, stung. Apparently I had a pattern. “Anyway, showering is the least of it. It’s worse for her than me, I bet. Let’s just forget it. How was temping?”
    “Vile. I read the same issue of
People
three times and someone called me ‘doll.’ ” She straightened up and turned to look at me. “We’re meeting Heather and those guys at the Union in an hour and a half, by the way.”
    “Who’s driving?”
    Jill rolled her eyes. “After today? I’m calling a cab. We’re getting loaded.”
    She went back in her room to get dressed, closing the door behind her. I stayed on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. I was thinking that, without even trying—in fact, while actively fighting off the influence—I had adopted some of my mother’s vocabulary of horizon expansion and branching out. That fetish was really hers more than mine. She signed me up for gymnastics and acting lessons when I was younger, later pointing out courses in the UW catalog that I would never have thought to take. Over the years I had indeed learned to balance on a narrow beam and leap over pommel horses, joined the freshman cast of
The Sisters Montague
as the flighty sister, and taken the occasional class in “Goddesses and Feminine Powers” and ended up enjoying it. In fact, I had been very good at gymnastics, though at first I had hated it on sheer principle (as a child I insisted on hating everything my mother pushed me into for the first several weeks) and faked a series of injuries my parents wisely ignored. After being forced to go for a month I had discovered that my usual lack of care for speed and objects around me, which translated into clumsiness everywhere else, transformed on the mats into sheer fearlessness. I was devoted to gymnastics until I was sixteen. My high school didn’t have a team, and I could tell the cost of the private lessons was taking a toll, so I gave it up. Not all my attempts were so successful. Singing lessons were an exercise in humiliation from the start, and, more recently, my brief foray into churchgoing had died off as soon as it began.
    I reached over and adjusted the fan so it blew right at me. I was sweating but hadn’t quite gathered the energy to shower yet. I gave myself another five minutes and closed my eyes.
    Church would not have been so bad except that I had told my mom I was going to attend St. Patrick’s every week. I had this idea that if I went to church I’d get involved in a group of some sort, or volunteer a bit. And maybe I just liked the idea of starting each Sunday with something welcoming and uplifting. When