Free Into Thin Air by Caroline Leavitt Page B

her neck. She smelled musty, of sweat and dirt and too much of Janet’s perfume. Spreading herself across their bed, she gazed out the window, drinking in the night.
    They did come back with ice cream, but not until two hours later. “Chocolate, your favorite,” Frank said, but when Lee touched the container, it was warm. She pried open the top. Inside, it was soup. “It’ll freeze right up again,” Janet said brightly. “Pop it right in the freezer.”
    â€œNever mind,” Lee said. “I think I’ll just go to sleep.”
    â€œWe’ll eat it all,” Frank warned.
    â€œThat’s okay,” Lee said. But she noticed that the ice cream stayed in the freezer all that week, finally replaced by a fresher, firmer pint that was eaten away in one hot afternoon.
    They began going out more and more, and always without her. She’d come home to notes scattered on the kitchen table. Gone to the movies. Gone to a play. Gone to dinner. And when she asked her father why she couldn’t come, he was silent for a minute. “Why, you’d hate the kind of plays we go to see,” he told her finally. “A girl like you, you should be out with your own friends, anyway.”
    Lee’s resolve turned steely. She had no intention of letting Frank erase her the way he had Claire. There were other ways of being seen, of getting attention.
    At fifteen, Frank said, Lee became beautiful. She dug out the old photographs she had salvaged of Claire and studied them, miming the poses. In front of her oak mirror she smiled the way her mother had. She crooked her arm behind her head, a 1950s pose. When Frank called her to dinner, she sauntered down with her hair in a braided tail down her back, the way Claire had worn it. She smiled at him with Claire’s smile. He was still for a moment, and then abruptly he excused himself from the table. “What got him?” Janet said, putting down a steaming plate of green beans. “I think he’s seen a ghost,” Lee said calmly.
    She was in high school then. Philadelphia High, a small middle-class school with a strict dress code Lee made it her business to ignore. She began wearing nothing but black, her skirts so short she couldn’t walk down a hallway without a teacher pulling her aside. “Why bother to wear a skirt at all?” a teacher demanded. “It’s no bother,” said Lee. She disdained the order to go to the sewing room and stitch on an extra hem of cloth and instead walked out the door and home.
    She looked for friends. She had dropped out of FTA because the few girls she had befriended had transferred to the Catholic high school a block away and the other girls didn’t trust her simply because she was now so different. She spent lunch hours contentedly reading by herself in a corner of the cafeteria; in the girls’ room she ignored the girls trading eye shadows and lip glosses; she listened to girls planning on going shopping and pretended she didn’t care.
    If she couldn’t have girlfriends, well, then, she centered on boys. The boys Lee was drawn to, though, were the ones who had somehow become high school legends. There was Dana Lallo, wiry and shaggy looking and bright enough, whose very presence was responsible for intricate love notes carved into numerous desktops and walls, scratched into an occasional gray metal locker. He never stayed with any girl for longer than a week, and it was rumored (though some said Dana himself had started and sustained this particular story) that he had fathered a son in Tennessee.
    There was Tony Santa, the first and only punk rocker at Philadelphia High. He sauntered around with his black hair shellacked into stiff fingers. He borrowed safety pins from the sewing teacher to wound his T-shirts with. The endearments he whispered to his fascinated following were the names of New York City subway stops. “Astor Place,” he murmured