“Are you okay?” Lilly asked. She was a tall blonde Atlantan who had stuck by me through sorority rush and all the other assorted horrors of our freshman year in college. She had pledged the best sorority on campus but she hardly bothered to notice it. She just kept on cutting my hair and going to breakfast in the dining hall with Cutter Mayberry, a tiny nondescript banker’s daughter from a small town in Tennessee who later turned out to have an exotic secret life downtown with a sailor. Lilly and I always ate breakfast with her because her room was next door and no one else in the residence house liked her. “What are they doing to you now? Come back here, Rhoda. Come sit down and tell me what they said.”

“It’s done. We’re moving away from Franklin this week. I won’t even get to be there. I won’t even get to tell my friends goodbye or pack the things in my room. They always do this to me, Lilly. They’ve been doing it forever. Both of them were born in places where they always lived. They think it’s fun to move around. But I think I’m going crazy. God, I think I really am.” I went back into the room I shared with Lilly and fell down on a bed. Lilly sat beside me and rubbed my soft still-wet hair. “Let’s go over to the pool and swim,” she said. “I love to watch you swim. And then we’ll go to the Waffle House and eat waffles. You want to do that? There’s a bloodmobile at the Kappa Sigma house. We can eat up everything in sight and then go and give a pint of blood and we’ll come out even. Remember the last time we did that and Doc McElroy fainted in the hall? Please don’t be sad, Rhoda. We can’t do anything about the things they do. They’re our parents. They get to run our lives.”

“They won’t run mine. I won’t go. I’ll stay in Franklin and live with Val. He’ll let me. I won a state contest with my column when I was a junior in high school. I won it two years in a row. A contest for grown people. They’re waiting for me to come back and write for them. I was going to work there all day in the summer. I was going to make three hundred dollars a month. I can’t believe they’d do this to me, Lilly. No one could do this to someone else.”

“Our parents can.” She began to stroke my back and neck. “They can do anything they want to do. Let’s go swimming, Rhoda. I love to watch you swim. Please don’t stay here. If we stay here, we’ll only end up crying.”