Sleepwalking

by Meg Wolitzer

It was summer, and she should be at the beach, they said, not sitting indoors in front of the air conditioner reading those depressing poems.

The poetry dealt with being young and feeling separate from the world and dreaming about death.

My mother said I was the laziest daughter she had ever seen, but I really didn’t care what she thought. I had the book; that was all that mattered.”

Claire longed for real passion, the kind she had read about in romantic novels.

There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.

She was confused about childhood now; there were wonderful memories left over, but they always made her sad when she started to recall them.

She wanted Lucy Ascher to herself. She did not want Julian snuggling up, trying to join in, as if it were a great game. Claire wanted to be the only one in the world who loved Lucy Ascher. She knew this was impossible and even silly, but she enjoyed pretending that she was Lucy Ascher’s disciple, the only one in the world who felt such far-reaching sorrow and joy when thinking about her. A passion of that sort is not something you share with another person.

I hated being home, and I hated coming back to school.”

“It wasn’t that my mother and father did not love me, or don’t love me even now; they do in their own resigned, puzzled way. I was constantly aware of being separate from them, a foster child in an inappropriate home. I had figured out early that things would remain this way.

Maybe we all eat our children.

There was no one else like her in the entire school, so she had naturally assumed there was no one else like her in the world.