Page 127 of How to Walk Away

But being with Kit seemed to help.

She made me get dressed and put on lipstick and go out to hip new restaurants with her. She made me listen to disco and sing with her—and she filmed everything. One afternoon, she drove me to the ocean.

“I’m worried about you,” she said, snapping my photo as we watched the waves. “You’re living like an old person.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She leaned over and sniffed me. “You’re a little mothballish, even.”

I swatted at her. “I am not.”

“You do remember you’re twenty-eight—not seventy-eight?”

“I think I’m doing okay,” I said. I was alive, wasn’t I? Maybe I wasn’t doing yoga at sunrise, but I did get out of bed every morning. Usually.

“Why haven’t you learned how to drive?”

“Where would I drive to?”

“Why haven’t you investigated braces for your legs?”

“I’m fine with the chair. It’s fine.”

“I think you need to try harder.”

She probably meant well, but I was tired of people meaning well. “I think you need to mind your own business.”

But Kit didn’t care. “You are my business,” she said with a shrug. “You always have been.”

She took a million pictures of me for her followers: me eating spaghetti, me getting my toenails painted rainbow colors, me sunbathing in heart-shaped sunglasses. She gave my pixie cut a freshen-up and Instagrammed that. She made me put on her retro 1950s lipstick and Instagrammed that. She even took a picture of the scars on my shoulder and Instagrammed that.

“Kit! Nobody wants to see my gross shoulder!”

“Everybody wants to see it. You’re an Instagram star, lady. Just accept it.”

But Kit just had to push me. On her last night, at dinner, in front of my mom, of all people, Kit said, “How’s your summer camp coming along?”

It felt like an awfully private question to bring up in a place as public as the dinner table. I glanced at my mother.

“Summer camp!” my mom said. “You want to go to summer camp?”

Kit said, “She wants tobuilda summer camp.”

My mom sat straight up.Build something? Yes, please!

She lobbed fifty questions at me at once, but I shut them all down.

“I haven’t even thought about it in months,” I said. Which was true.

But that night, as I was falling asleep, I found myself thinking about it again. Under the onslaught of real life in the real world, I’d almost forgotten the idea entirely. It was so like Kit to remind me.

Overnight, my head flooded with ideas, and the next morning, before I’d even had coffee, I wheeled into the kitchen in my pajamas to find some paper, and I made a list off the top of my head:

chair bowling

bonfires

gardening

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