Free In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas Page A

was. This young man, whom I’ll call Pete, was instantly cast in my mindas the older brother figure, the prospective new star. No dad? There was Pete. I liked Pete. Pete liked me. He was demonstrably tickled by my snark. Like every northeastern prep school ninth grader, I toted around a dog-eared and heavily underlined copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
, so I was delighted by Pete’s Holden Caulfield gestalt. We had actual smart teenage conversations, which I had never had before, having only recently become a teenager myself.
    Plus, Pete knew about real music. He had been in a band of the King Crimson/Traffic/Gentle Giant variety, and his room was meticulously patchworked from ceiling to floor with posters featuring the album cover artwork of bands known to music-heads as
real
musicians. I became Pete’s student in colloquia on the primacy of guitarists like Jimmy Page, Randy Rhoads, Edgar Winter, and Al Di Meola; on stylus care and the key differences between various makes of subwoofer; on how to parse liner notes for salient information. Pete’s parents let him smoke in his room, and since the door was always shut, I learned to roll my own Drum cigarettes and blow smoke rings nonchalantly, perched on my knees on his tapestry-covered floor in my school uniform’s short navy blue kilt and gray knee socks. He took me to parties with his college-aged friends who went to cool, smart schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan. He looked out for me.
    In this regard, I might have been like any girl with a big brother. But I was not, as it turned out. Although I had cast him as big brother, Pete had seen himself in a different role. The night he disclosed this by leaning into me on my twin bed while our parents were engaged in a dinner party downstairs, he grinned, kissing me on the mouth: “You knew this was going to happen.” I had not known. He was so much older—I had not known at all. As he pressed me into my rainbow comforter, I started to laugh. “You kill me!” I said, parroting Holden Caulfield. “You kill me!”
    The Greeks knew what happens when fatherless daughters are allowed to wander unattended to pick flowers in open fields. The girl is swallowed up by Hades, eats the pomegranate seeds (the food ofthe dead), and returns at least seeming like a woman, certainly changed and rootless. Something dark and familiar rushed through my gut the first time I read these lines in Louise Glück’s poem “Persephone the Wanderer”: “Is she / at home nowhere? Is she / a born wanderer?”
    I didn’t know where to go, what to do—not then, not in the weeks and the months that followed, and since it was already done anyway, it didn’t seem to make much difference that it continued. My mother, alternately frantic about keeping her job and swooning with grief over my father’s leaving us, did not really register that I essentially vanished. I started dropping out of the things that I had been good at doing, like field hockey and theater; my formerly large circle of friends narrowed to about two. And I smoked. A lot. I started smoking at thirteen, up to almost a pack a day by the time I was fifteen; within the year, I had done most the drugs of the era. In short order, I seemed to be someone who knew a lot. My mother, I think, noted a newly forged steeliness, but I was simply, in her mind, “advanced,” as I was, in her mind, in all things. And Pete’s parents, after all, were doing her a tremendous favor.
    It would later surface that Pete’s parents had known that their son had feelings for me, and in hindsight, this may have been their reason for helping my mother with the after-school arrangement. They were worried sick about Pete because he, as it turned out, had suffered a great deal. Three years before, he had been involved in a car accident in which a girl he loved was killed. Psychotherapy and major surgery had propped him up in the physical world, but he had not shown signs of emotional recuperation. They wanted their