diverged from my sister’s, and it felt as though there was no common ground
between us. The hours passed; it was late afternoon; and still she felt distant
from me, still she refused to meet my gaze.
I had brought a small porcelain tea set for her children, and when they
began to quarrel over the teapot, I gathered up the pieces. The oldest girl
reminded me that she was five now, which she said was too old to have a toy
taken away. “If you act like a child,” I said, “I’ll treat you like one.”
I don’t know why I said it; I suppose Shawn was on my mind. I regretted
the words even as they left my lips, hated myself for saying them. I turned to
pass the tea set to my sister, so she could administer justice however she saw
fit, but when I saw her expression I nearly dropped it. Her mouth hung open
in a perfect circle.
“Shawn used to say that,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine.
That moment would stay with me. I would remember it the next day, when
I boarded a plane in Salt Lake City, and it would still be on my mind when I
landed in London. It was the shock of it that I couldn’t shake. Somehow, it
had never occurred to me that my sister might have lived my life before I did.
That term, I presented myself to the university like resin to a sculptor. I
believed I could be remade, my mind recast. I forced myself to befriend other
students, clumsily introducing myself again and again until I had a small
circle of friends. Then I set out to obliterate the barriers that separated me
from them. I tasted red wine for the first time, and my new friends laughed at
my pinched face. I discarded my high-necked blouses and began to wear
more fashionable cuts—fitted, often sleeveless, with less restrictive
necklines. In photos from this period I’m struck by the symmetry: I look like
everyone else.
In April I began to do well. I wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s concept
of self-sovereignty, and my supervisor, Dr. David Runciman, said that if my
dissertation was of the same quality, I might be accepted to Cambridge for a
PhD. I was stunned: I, who had sneaked into this grand place as an impostor,
might now enter through the front door. I set to work on my dissertation,
again choosing Mill as the topic.
One afternoon near the end of term, when I was eating lunch in the library
cafeteria, I recognized a group of students from my program. They were
seated together at a small table. I asked if I could join them, and a tall Italian
named Nic nodded. From the conversation I gathered that Nic had invited the