Autobiography of Us Read Online Free PDF

flower pinned behind her ear; the tear in my uniform stitched up by her neat hand; the complicated recipes she clipped from magazines and followed to the letter, the heat in that small kitchen making her pretty face gleam. We have to try harder , she told me as she stood behind me before bed, setting my hair in curlers. A challenge , she called it. No, I was afraid I would lose Alex because I knew I’d in some sense already let her go. Because, I mean, I’d found something I loved as much as I loved her.
    And so when she asked, I lied. I’d learned how to roast a chicken, I told her, holding up my hands as though to show my scars. I’d spent the day helping my mother polish the goddamn silver.
    How little we know the ones we love. How little we know of anyone, in the end.

Chapter 4
    OF course I lost her anyway. His name was Bertrand Lowell.
    He was a year ahead of us in school, a Browning boy like the rest of them. All anyone said about him growing up was that he was a genius, rumored to have received a near-perfect score on the Wechsler-Bellevue. We were juniors at Windridge the day he punched his history teacher in the eye for reasons that remained unclear; even the other Browning boys in the room that day couldn’t put words to the particulars. All anyone knew was that the teacher had been rushed to the emergency room and that Bertrand reappeared in the hallways the following Monday without further explanation. The Lowells were rumored to have made a sizable donation to the school, a story supported by the fact that the teacher—just as quietly as Bertrand had been let back in—was let go at the end of the year.
    He hardly looked the part. He was tall and thin, the kind of skinny mothers clicked their tongues over at the pool as they watched their sons cannonball into the deep end, spines gleaming in the California sun. By the time we were in our first year at the university and Bertrand Lowell was in his second, what adolescent fat that had rounded out the corners of his body was gone. Even at nineteen, he dressed like a much older man: dark fitted jackets, dark chinos, and dark shoes. He brushed his black hair down so it lay flat against his head; his cheeks were sunk in like the flesh there had been scooped out with a spoon. He had a wide mouth, thin, mobile lips, and light-blue eyes so pale the pupils seemed to float there in the whites, untethered.
    Not that any of that really mattered—the shiny black shoes or the sleek black hair, the slender, almost feminine frame. All anyone cared about was the story of that punch, the way it trailed behind him through the years like a red balloon. It was because of that that all at once every girl in school would have done anything to get his attention. To have known, even for a moment, that he had noticed us.
    * * *
    But even that’s not right, exactly. I lost Alex twice: The first was long before Bertrand Lowell. She went to a theater camp somewhere north of the city the summer we graduated Windridge—one last hurrah, as she put it, before her mother put her foot down.
    “She says I might as well get it out of my system,” she told me. “It’s like someone telling you to go take one last walk with your dying dog. Morbid, really. Macabre.” She frowned. “Either or. Point being, I won’t have any spare time come fall. Too busy chairing the Junior League, according to Eleanor. Pledging Theta Alpha whosie-whatsit.”
    “I’m going to miss you.”
    She grinned. “I know.”
    “I’m going to be so goddamn lonely.” I tried to make my voice light; I’m sure I didn’t fool her for a second.
    “You’ll have a fabulous time. Lounging around at the pool and sleeping late every day—I’m jealous.” She got that far-off look she sometimes did when she was reading me a scene from one of her plays, her lips parted slightly to expose the front tooth that bent inward—the result, she insisted, of being dropped as a child, though I could never make up my mind as