Free Soul Catcher by Katia Lief Page B

school?’
    ‘You and Mom got married three months after you met. You eloped.’
    His eyes went dreamy, cloudy, wet. ‘Our parents were furious,’ he said. ‘We were still in college. They thought we were ruining our lives. But we both finished college and we both went to law school. It wasn’t easy, but we were happy and that made all the difference.’
    ‘What do you see in her?’
    The muscles in his face tensed instantly upon abandoning the memory. ‘That’s inappropriate,’ he said.
    ‘So?’
    ‘Patrick’s a nice boy.’
    I felt a sudden urge to beat down any image he had of me as a know-nothing- good-little-girl. I said, ‘He’s a drug addict, Dad.’
    He smiled and shook his head. He didn’t believe me. Finally I left the room.
    Patrick told me that the first year of divorce is the hardest, but that eventually you get so used to it, you can’t even picture your parents together. I had completed the first month and could still barely picture them apart. Dad’s new life was a determination against our old life. He was pulling himself out of the mental picture I tried to sustain of Mom and Dad together. He was putting himself in another picture, one that for me was impossible. So instead of granting him that, I would obliterate him. I would not succumb to the picture of my parents apart, but would allowhim to fade out of the single picture of them together. I would abandon him to my past, stash him away in my memory.
    I had to. My childhood had betrayed me. Now, growing up was the only thing left.
    That night, I practiced wearing Gwen’s black negligee, posing in front of the bathroom mirror, studying myself. I liked the sexy redheaded girl staring back at me. She was pretty. Her breasts were small and so were her hips and waist. The negligee had thin straps that flowed into lace and then silk. It came down to just above her knees, which looked a little knobby. Her hair sizzled over her pale freckled shoulders. The deep black of the silk accentuated her natural colors: the dark green of her eyes, the pink of her lips, the vivid orange of her hair, the white of her skin. She was the first image of a young woman I ever saw in myself. She looked at me straight in the eye, and smiled.
    Dad and Lisa had gone to bed. I moved around the apartment nonchalantly, turning off lights. When I came into the living room, I deliberately didn’t look at Patrick, who was half in his sleeping bag, staring at the t.v. I lay on top of my sleeping bag, crossed my ankles, and waited for him to notice.
    He ignored me.
    I giggled and rolled over, and finally he looked. His eyes were smiling, but his forehead was bunched with tension.
    ‘Where did you get that thing?’
    ‘It’s Gwen’s.’
    He slid all the way into his sleeping bag and rolled over, away from me. A second later, he rolled back to face me.
    ‘Would you marry me?’ he asked. ‘Theoretically, I mean.’
    ‘Sure!’
    ‘Good.’ He rolled back over. ‘As long as we understand each other.’
    After a while, he started to snore in long, sawing breaths. I wasn’t insulted. I knew he was doing this for me, that refusing the sex I offered him was his way of loving me. Hehad been through his own parents’ divorce. He was older than me. He knew what highs were real, and when, and he knew enough to spot a quick escape. He was a master at quick escapes; just look at his arms. He loved me and didn’t want me to learn to use escapes, too. Like sex. I really wasn’t ready. And he knew.

SEVEN
    I was still a virgin when we got back from Thanksgiving vacation. I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I was relieved, since virginity was all I knew and so it was comforting. But on the other hand, I was curious and wanted to know what waited on the other side, you know, the inside part of my body where sex would change me into a woman. I was still a girl. Which turned out to be just fine, since when the big scandal happened, no one could rightfully say that