I swam a 6:45 in the Southeastern Conference Championships in Knoxville and a 1:09 in the 100-yard breaststroke and took home two blue ribbons. My butterfly had been off all spring and I placed third in that. Also, I completely quit going to Chi Omega meetings. I had only joined to save face anyway and I was reading Shakespeare in the Joint University Library at night hoping my English teacher would notice me on his way in or out of the stacks where he was locked up every night working on his Ph.D. He was a lanky Jewish intellectual who reminded me of Bob Rosen, my long-lost love in Harrisburg, Illinois. I had noticed him staring at my Chi O pin one day in class so I took it off and never wore it again. I think now he was looking at my breasts but who was I to know that back then? I didn’t even know it was against the rules for teachers to have love affairs with students. Not that I knew what a love affair was either. Once a boy had put his hand inside my underpants every night for twelve nights, but aside from that it was lost love in Illinois and things I wrote and stuff I read. I wish I had the notebooks I used to keep in those years. I wish I could read the lies I used to tell the pages in my careful legible teenage script.

My father showed up one day in early May and left a Cadillac at a friend’s house for me to drive to my new home when school was over.