One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

Change is slow. If you’re not paying attention you’ll miss it.

No one thinks our tracks are a great or fair system, but great and fair systems are expensive, and tracks-with-flaws are all we can afford.

All of us have special needs

Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.”

Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.”

People are complicated. They’re more than one thing. They’re less than another. You, for instance. We could file you under ‘Girl’ or ‘Student’ or ‘Triplet’ or ‘Tall.’”

though I sometimes have pain, I am grateful to have feeling at all.

And no one except Mab cares where anyone else goes to college. Only the people who also go there are impressed, and you already know them so they will be evaluating you on your other merits or lack thereof anyway. But talking about where other people are going to college is something people do care about, and it is contagious like yawns or strep throat, so Mama gets mad at me for not doing my homework, and the person whose fault that is is River.

Mother love is a powerful force. She is so essentially a part of me—like a limb, an organ—that maybe without her, I will simply cease to be.

It’s funny how something can be both shocking and inevitable,

What feels so different is having, for the first time in my life, in our lives, a little bit of control, a plan, some sense that what happens next might not be something done to us but something, for better or for worse, we do ourselves.

If you look closer, if you go slowly, there can be story even without progress or plot, life in small change, like Dante and Beatrice, like fish swimming hard against the current just to stay where they are.

They’re not getting anywhere, neither Dante nor the fish, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t effort, growth, triumph, and beautiful poetry. Trust me, stasis is challenging. And challenge is story.

And if you go slowly enough, every moment of the day becomes its own journey, either its own triumph, which you get to celebrate, or its own failure, which you get to move on from, by definition, in the very next moment. If you operate at speed, each word is not a victory, each swallowed piece of food or sip of water is not a conquest. If you operate at speed, you need bigger things to vanquish than a sentence or a muffin or a single line of King Lear.

It occurs to me for the first time: there are some ways, some crucial, breathtaking, shattering ways, in which Nathan Templeton’s lot is far unluckier than mine. I mean, there’s money and mobility and living in the house on the hill, but which would you choose: parental love and support and pride, or a chemical company mired in public relations nightmares and a tenuous all-eggs-in reopening plan, the thwarting of which is currently being concocted by three tenacious teenagers? “I can imagine that would be a very seductive feeling,” Nora allows.

But the other thing about Romeo and Juliet? Both only children. Not a sister between them. And you can tell because even when you’re happy and don’t want to hear it, sisters won’t let you settle a blood feud or fake your own death. Sisters don’t care how he’s magic or how it feels when his hands touch your face and his eyes meet your eyes or how much he changes your life and opens your world and everything in it, especially you. They won’t green-light your ill-founded, life-ruining plan just because you’re in love. With sisters, at the very least, you’re going to need a much better reason than that.

but even the illusion of something precious can also be precious.

There are so many people who have sinned a little and a lot. There are so many people who deserve some of the blame. But that means there is never anyone whose responsibility it is to take responsibility. There is no one who must make it right, no one who must make amends. There is so much, therefore, that stays wrong and unmended.

“Because you want to go home?” I ask, for I have learned that home is not just where you live. Home is also where you want and need and are meant to live. Home is also the people who are there with you, who are the people who will help you live, who are the people who will do the best they can, not just for themselves, but for you, their neighbors and friends, as well. “Because I want what’s fair,” says Apple Templeton. Three

We have shared a room, a life, a heart all these weeks and months and all the years before these weeks and months, and she has fallen in love without ever once noticing that I have fallen in love as well.

It is not enough to be loved by your mother. It is a good start, and you wouldn’t want to do without, and it helps, but it is not enough. You need also the love of your community, the love of friends and admirers, the love of strangers who don’t know you but still wish you well, the love that comes from passion and from commitment and from someone who will never, never betray you and not just because they’re related to you.

You need more love. We all need more love. And here—in this town, in this body—love is abundant but it is not sufficient. It is not enough. She crosses the room and takes my head in both her hands, makes me look into her eyes when she says, “You are wonderful exactly as you are, and I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

“It’s possible to want two things at once, you know.” I do, of course. “Even opposite things. Even things that contradict and contraindicate. We don’t talk about that enough.” I don’t talk about anything enough.

Are we more angry or more desperate? Which is a measure of our souls. It may be a question, but it isn’t a choice.

“Independent testing does not prove anything if the independent tester is your roommate from college specially matched for compatibility.” “Truth,” I say.

It’s our turn now, and we must tell the destory, what happened instead, what happens next. Revenge, recrimination, restitution—where you prove it and you sue and you win and that’s why they leave and that’s how you move on—all of that is the old story, and we left that one somewhere along the path, forking off to where we are now, on our secret way in the night.

It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story.

sometimes you have to destroy—or destory—something in order to save it.

They say you can’t go home again, but it’s not true. You can. But only if you’re the river.