The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

She turned the page, to where her own notations, in pencil, began. These were mostly lists. Lists of books she’d read, and books she wanted to read, and of poems she knew by heart; lists of presents she’d got for birthday and Christmas, and who they were from; lists of places she’d visited (nowhere very exotic) and lists of places she wanted to go (Easter Island, Antarctica, Machu Picchu, Nepal). There were lists of people she admired: Napoleon and Nathan Bedford Forrest, Genghis Khan and Lawrence of Arabia, Alexander the Great and Harry Houdini and Joan of Arc. There was a whole page of complaints about sharing a room with Allison. There were lists of vocabulary words—Latin and English—and an inept Cyrillic alphabet which she’d done her laborious best to copy from the encyclopedia one afternoon when she had nothing else to do.