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5.

Heidi clung to my arm as we walked the three blocks to the diner. This was as much about practicality as it was affection: She walked with a limp, the result of an old car accident that had left her bedridden with a fractured spine for much of her adolescence. They said she’d never walk again, but she refused to accept that diagnosis and eventually proved them wrong. Her pugnaciousness was one of the things I loved about her.

Our friendship was a much happier accident. Two years earlier, on one of our stops at the Country Bookshelf, the middle-aged woman at the counter had held up the copy of On the Origin of Species that my father was purchasing, her eyes running from the book cover to me and back again.

“Your daughter is homeschooled,” she observed.

My father looked like he might snatch the book right back out of her hand. “Who told you that?”

“Well, it’s Wednesday morning and your daughter isn’t in school, and I suspect this reading material isn’t intended for you.” When he didn’t disagree, she turned to me. “How old are you, sweetheart?”

“Fifteen,” I answered.

She lit up. “Well, that’s just perfect. I have someone you should meet.” She turned and shouted toward the back of the store, “Heidi, can you come out here a second?”

A small round girl appeared in the door of the stockroom and walked toward us. She was redheaded and fair, but her face was so thick with freckles that it looked like she had a tan. She wore lavender head-to-toe, from her fuzzy angora sweater down to her striped knee-high socks. Even with the cane in her hand, she moved quickly, with a funny lopsided waddle that reminded me of a drunk penguin.

“My daughter, Heidi,” announced the woman—this was Lina, the store manager, I was to learn. “She’s been doing school at home, too, ever since the accident. We’re always looking for other homeschooled girls to connect with.”

Heidi’s eyes met mine. I was acutely aware of my own pastel-free outfit, pieced together from trips to thrift stores and the Army Navy. Flannel shirt, cargo pants, boots with lug soles, everything selected for practicality rather than fashion. But this girl didn’t stare or curl up her nose, the way the kids I passed on the Bozeman streets sometimes did. She just grinned, with teeth as crooked as her spine, and stuck out her free hand.

“Pleasedtameetcha,” she said.

—

If my father wasn’t thrilled about my one-and-only friend, in all her conspicuous-consumptive glory, he was also wise enough not to discourage it. He knew, I think, that I had grown aware of the existence of other kids in the world, and my own isolation from them. Maybe he had calculated that keeping me secluded was more likely to fuel any burgeoning teenage discontent than a solitary friend would. It’s possible he also reasoned that he shouldn’t upset Lina, who managed one of the handful of bookstores in Montana that allowed him to stick Libertaire on its racks, and who also gave him all the out-of-date newspapers and magazines for free.

Friendship was a logistical challenge. I’d never been allowed to go to Heidi’s house, and she certainly wasn’t invited to mine. Distance and lack of transportation made it difficult to see each other, but at least there was the telephone. I’d tell her stories about life in the woods, about the raccoons that mated under our porch, and the geothermal cooling system my father was trying to build; she’d tell me about what was happening in town, the people she saw on the streets, and the plots of the Meg Ryan movies she’d watched. She complained about her mom, always hovering and anxious; and I think she expected me to do the same about my father, but I didn’t exactly know how. What other reference points did I have to compare him to, anyway? I had never met any other dads. I didn’t know what was normal.

Looking back, I have to wonder what Heidi found compelling about me. It wasn’t my worldliness—I had the social-emotional intelligence of a toad, even if I could quote Baudelaire and knew how to kill a chicken—and it certainly wasn’t that I was a fun gossip. Maybe she was taking pity on me, in my isolation; or maybe she didn’t have any other options for friends, either. Possibly she just found me interesting, like a novelty act in a vaudeville show. Even in Montana, a state full of iconoclasts, you didn’t meet a lot of kids who had been raised almost completely off the grid.

Whatever the reason for Heidi’s enthusiasm, I certainly wasn’t about to questionit.

—

The Western Café was exactly what its name suggests, an old-school diner whose knotty-pine walls were hung with taxidermic turkeys and vintage rifles and handy illustrated diagrams of fishing lures. We sat at the counter and sipped black coffee that tasted like old pencils. The café was populated entirely by good old boys at that hour, butt cracks visible on every stool; but for a teenager who had spent most of her life in the same patch of woods, sitting there with an actual friend felt like the height of adult sophistication.

I picked at my cinnamon roll, slick with icing. “Is it true, that you’re going to enroll in school?”

“Thinking about it,” she said. “I’m sick of spending my days studying in the stockroom of the Country Bookshelf. God, I don’t think I’ve spoken to a boy in, like, a year?” She looked at me, expecting me to be horrified by this revelation, though of course I’d never spoken to a boy in, like, ever ? “Maybe you could move to town by yourself, even if your dad doesn’t want to. We have an extra bedroom.”

“My father is never going to let that happen, Heidi.”

She took a big bite of her roll, sugar icing frosting her lips. “Yeah, I guess not. He was in a real downer mood today, wasn’t he?”

“That’s just his personality.”

“Don’t you get tired of it?”

I shrugged. “He knows what he believes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“My mom, she’s always trying so hard to be upbeat and optimistic, I think she believes that a positive attitude is somehow going to erase all the bullshit from my accident. But gosh, it’s not like you can smile away pain.” When I looked at her with unease, she laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got opioids for that . Anyway”—she pulled a small box out of her pocket and handed it to me—“here. For your birthday.”

Her gift was wrapped in butterfly paper and tied with a shiny gold ribbon, prettier than anything I owned. I stared at it so long that she finally elbowed me in the ribs. “You’re supposed to open it, idiot.”

I picked at the tape with a ragged fingernail, sliding the paper off carefully so that it wouldn’t tear, thinking that I might fold it and save it. Inside was a white cardboard box, and inside that, a small silver chain with a dolphin pendant. A tiny blue jewel winked from its solitary eye.

“It made me think of you,” she said.

I had no clue why the pendant made her think of me—I didn’t own a piece of jewelry, nor did I care much about dolphins—and yet I was in danger of crying into my coffee. “This is the nicest gift I’ve ever been given.”

“Don’t be too impressed, that’s not a sapphire and I’m pretty sure it’s just plated. Don’t wear it in a swimming pool or you’ll end up with a green neck.”

“That’s not going to be a problem,” I said. “As I’ve never actually been in a swimming pool and I don’t see that changing anytime.”

I lifted my braids so that she could fasten the chain around my neck. She sat back to assess it, then adjusted the pendant until it was centered on my sweatshirt. “I’m going to make my mom take me to the zoo when we go to Chicago. They have a dolphin exhibit there. Apparently, you can even feed them fish by hand, doesn’t that seem wild?”

It did, but I was distracted by the other part of her story. “You’re going to Chicago?”

“We’re visiting colleges over Thanksgiving break. I’m looking at Loyola. It’s not my top choice, though. I want to go live somewhere warm for a while . Like Miami. Or Texas. But my mom went to Loyola so I might be able to get a legacy scholarship.”

I took a swallow of tepid coffee, feeling it sour in my stomach. “But that’s so far away. You don’t want to go to Montana State?”

“God, I think I’d die. Do you want to stay in Bozeman for college?” She hesitated, suddenly realizing: “Wait, you are going to apply to college, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. I’d mentioned college to my father a few months earlier, and the conversation had ended just about the way that I expected. “I went to Harvard, the best college in America,” he’d said. “I ended up completely in debt to some financial institution and what did I get for it? Nothing. College is a scam. You’re not paying for an education. You’re paying for a piece of paper that’s supposed to quantify your value to society, an utterly arbitrary and meaningless valuation.” He’d tapped on the pile of books I was studying. “This is what counts. I’m teaching you everything they taught me. Just as good as a Harvard education, but free, and no one judging you.”

“College is a scam,” I told Heidi. “You pay a fortune for the right to get drunk at frat parties and learn how to play bongos. Besides, we don’t have the money for it, even if I did want to go.”

“So you’re going to, what? Just stay in the cabin with your dad forever, even after you finish high school?” She looked horrified.

“Not forever,” I said, as if I’d put endless hours of thought into it. But honestly, I was still fuzzy on the alternatives that might be available to me without a driver’s license or a monetizable skill set or a credentialed education. Would it be so bad, really, to stay in our cabin forever? My father certainly seemed to have no intention of us ever leaving. You don’t understand, this is the best place to be. I picked it special for you. The world is ugly and cruel, you are safe here with me. He’d said this before, more times than I could count. And how could I argue with that? It was true that nothing bad had ever happened to me there, in our cabin. The horrors of the world at large—the wars and conflicts, the modern frivolities that rot your brain and make you soft, the mass murderers and government agents and people who would want to hurt you—existed only beyond the borders of our property, not within.

We hadn’t always been so cloistered. When I was much younger, my father used to take me on day trips to strange towns, some of them quite a drive away. We’d eat ice cream cones and wander around the town’s main street, looking in the shop windows but rarely going in. My memories of these trips were vague, but they came underlined by a tinge of anxiety: of waiting in a cold car while my father ran his adult errands, his palpable state of agitation at being out in the world, the sugar on my tongue soured by a sense of guilt. Maybe that’s why my father eventually called a stop to them.

We’d stayed in our cabin ever since. And I always told myself that this was fine withme.

And yet. More and more lately I’d found myself fantasizing about getting behind the wheel of my father’s truck and just driving. Across the Montana state line. Maybe even all the way to one of the coasts. To get a glimpse of the ocean; or a big city; or anything, really, besides the same patch of land that I’d been looking at for my entire childhood.

Heidi was staring at me. She leaned in so close that I could see the flakes of mascara in her lashes. “Please don’t do this to yourself, Jane. Don’t act like you don’t care.”

“I’m happy; it’s fine,” I told Heidi, a little too assertively.

“Remember, you’ll be eighteen in a year, and then you’ll be a legal adult,” she continued. “He can’t keep you prisoner after that.”

“I’m not a prisoner, ” I retorted, defensive. Still, Heidi’s words stuck to me, like a burr in fur: Was I? In thirteen years, I’d never left the property without my father. I barely left the property at all. That was an awful lot like prison, if you looked at it that way. I shook my head, trying to dispel the notion, and slammed back the last of my coffee.

“Want refills?” A waitress was standing over us, brandishing an ancient carafe.

I silently pushed my cup forward, just as the front door of the café opened with a bang. My father stood in the doorway, his arms wrapped around the paper sack—still stuffed with copies of Libertaire, I noticed with a twinge of concern. His eyes scanned the room, looking for me, but skidded across me as if I were a stranger of no interest. And then they sprang back, with a look of shock, and I realized that he hadn’t recognizedme.

He smiled at me, but his smile was like a coiled spring, tight and ominous. “You ready?”

I wasn’t, but the expression on his face suggested that I didn’t have a choice. I stood and fished in my pocket, wondering if a dollar might have magically materialized there.

“Don’t worry,” Heidi said, her hand grabbing mine. “I got this.”

“Call me when you get back from Chicago?”

“Of course,” she said. “We’ll do something when I get back. Maybe we can go to the movies. I want to go see Romeo and Juliet .” She smiled encouragingly.

“We’ll do that, for sure,” I lied.