Free Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

where you live."
    "Alone?"
    "Maybe."

    "I don't want to be alone. I'm tired of myself"
    "Well, you could let visitors come. In small boats."
    "I don't want to play king of the castle anymore. I want to live with other people, Nat. I used to think other people didn't matter, but they do. You can't hack it all by yourself"
    "Is that why you're going to State?"
    "I guess so."
    "But you said last winter that your problem at school was the way things are set up there, to level everybody down so that nobody's anybody. Won't State be just like that only bigger?"
    "The entire world is like school, only bigger."
    "No it isn't." She looked stubborn and played some very ugly chords very softly on the piano. "School is where you can't decide anything yet. The rest of the world is where you have to. You aren't going to, you know, decide never to decide anything, be a groupie, are you?"

    "But see, I'm so sick of going against the others, being different. It gets you nowhere. If I do like the others do—"
    She went BRWHANNGGG! on the piano keys.
    "The others are all doing like the other others, so that they can all get along together and not be alone," I said. "Man is a social species. So why the hell can't I?"
    "Because you aren't any good at it," she said.
    "So what do I do? Go back to Thorn and be a crazy hermit the rest of my life writing dumb stuff nobody reads?"
    "No. You go to MIT and show them how good you are."
    "It costs too much."

    BRRWWWHAANNNGGG!
    "They give him three thousand dollars, and he
complains
," she said.
    "Its going to cost like sixteen or twenty thousand to go there just the first four years."
    "Borrow it. Steal it. Sell your stupid car!"
    "I already wrecked it," I said, and I began to laugh.
    "Wrecked it? The car? In the accident?"
    "Totalled," I said, laughing like crazy. She began laughing, too. I have no idea why we were laughing. It was all of a sudden funny. The whole thing. Everything had been so out of proportion, and all of a sudden it was like I was in proportion and could see it.
    "My father got practically the whole value of it in insurance," I said. "Cash."
    "Well then!"
    "Well then?"
    "There's your first year. You worry about the next year next year."

    "Gorillas build new nests every night," I said. "They sleep in nests, up in trees. They build really lousy ones, very sloppy. They have to build new ones every night because they keep moving on, and besides they foul up the old ones with banana peels and other effluvia. The rule for primates, maybe, is to keep moving on and building nests, one at a time, until they learn to do it right. Or to throw out the banana peels at least."
    Natalie was still sitting at the piano, and she played about six seconds of a thing by Chopin that she had been studying back in December, the Revolutionary Étude. She said, "I wish I understood...."
    I got up off the floor and sat down by her on the piano bench and played some nothing with both hands. "See, I don't understand how to play the piano. But when you play it, I hear the music."

    She looked at me and I looked at her, and we kissed each other on the mouth. But modestly: six seconds at the maximum.

    T HERE IS MORE , of course, but that seems to be all of this thing I wanted to tell. The "more" is just what happened next and keeps on happening—each days new gorilla nest.
    I got the scholarship thing out of my desk drawer next day and showed it to my parents, and said that with the car insurance money I could get started at MIT. My mother began to get very upset, really angry, as if I was pulling a dirty trick on her. I don't know if I could have handled that, but my father came in on my side. This is what you always forget, you think you know what to expect, but you don't; what you expect is what doesn't happen, and what you don't expect is what does. My father said that if I worked summers and kept getting tuition scholarships, he would pay the rest. My mother felt really betrayed and refused to go