It felt like much longer since I’d been here, as if living with Edmund and Momma Oaks belonged to some other me; just as the one who lived down below was someone else, 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
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