Chapter 1
Growing up, I had two best friends—Margaret, whom I had known my whole life, and Eleanor, with whom I was in love, though for years I had no reason to tell my feelings for one apart from my feelings for the other. Both were fervent.
Eleanor asked me for advice about her Sims, then never took it.
Margaret asked me in which of a series of nearly identical photos I thought her boobs looked best for the internet, so I told her.
I kept the clothes Eleanor lent me for too long, and I kept the clothes Margaret lent me for too long.
Eleanor didn’t borrow anybody’s clothes, and Margaret never gave mine back at all.
We chose each other’s outfits. We slept in each other’s beds.
I had a near constant awareness of both my friends as existing in parallel to myself.
And that awareness became tender when we were apart, painful when I was apart from them and they were not apart from each other.
This happened often enough. They both had a great deal more freedom than I did.
Margaret because she was lawless and Eleanor because her parents never made any laws.
Until the summer before our sophomore year of high school, I thought my love for Eleanor was my love for Margaret.
Distinctions between ways of loving are fuzzy, and I couldn’t name them, didn’t even know I felt them, and least of all suspected I would soon ruin my life learning to distinguish them—learning I wanted more than one way to love my friends.