so many versions of the girl I glimpsed in the mirror. I felt grown, enough not to need to attend Mrs. James’s stupid school, but maybe I wasn’t the person I might become yet either. Perhaps that was the point; life, if you did it right, meant learning and changing. If you didn’t, you died—or stopped growing—which amounted to more or less the same thing. So I would slide in and out of different roles until I discovered the one that fit me best.