Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

it off. Move on. Learn to be more careful.”

      “Like it never even happened?”

      “Patty, the people at the party were all friends of his. They’re going to say they saw you get drunk and be aggressive with him. They’ll say you were behind a shed that wasn’t more than thirty feet from the pool, and they didn’t hear anything un toward.”

      “It was really noisy. There was music and shouting.”

      “They’ll also say they saw the two of you leaving later in the evening and getting into his car. And the world will see an Exeter boy who’s going to Princeton and was responsible enough to use contraceptives, and gentleman enough to leave the party and drive you home.”

      The deceptive little rain was wetting the collar of Patty’s T-shirt.

      “You’re not really on my side, are you,” she said.

      “Of course I am.”

      “You keep saying ‘Of course,’ ‘Of course.’ ”

      “Listen to me. The P.A. is going to want to know why you didn’t scream.”

      “I was embarrassed! Those weren’t my friends!”

      “But do you see that this is going to be hard for a judge or a jury to understand? All you would have had to do was scream, and you would have been safe.”

      Patty couldn’t remember why she hadn’t screamed. She had to admit that, in hindsight, it seemed bizarrely agreeable of her.

      “I fought, though.”

      “Yes, but you’re a top-tier student athlete. Shortstops get scratched and bruised all the time, don’t they? On the arms? On the thighs?”

      “Did you tell Mr. Post I’m a virgin? I mean, was?”

      “I didn’t consider that any of his business.”

      “Maybe you should call him back and tell him that.”

      “Look,” her dad said. “Honey. I know it’s horrendously unfair. I feel terrible for you. But sometimes the best thing is just to learn your lesson and make sure you never get in the same position again. To say to yourself, ‘I made a mistake, and I had some bad luck,’ and then let it. Let it, ah. Let it drop.”

      He turned the ignition halfway, so that the panel lights came on. He kept his hand on the key.

      “But he committed a crime,” Patty said.

      “Yes, but better to, uh. Life’s not always fair, Pattycakes. Mr. Post said he thought Ethan might be willing to apologize for not being more gentlemanly, but. Well. Would you like that?”

      “No.”

      “I didn’t think so.”

      “Coach Nagel says I should go to the police.”

      “Coach Nagel should stick to her dribbling,” her dad said.

      “Softball,” Patty said. “It’s softball season now.”

      “Unless you want to spend your entire senior year being publicly humiliated.”

      “Basketball is in the winter. Softball is in the spring, when the weather’s warmer?”

      “I’m asking you: is that really how you want to spend your senior year?”

      “Coach Carver is basketball,” Patty said. “Coach Nagel is softball. Are you getting this?”

      Her dad started the engine.

      As a senior, instead of being publicly humiliated, Patty became a real player, not just a talent. She all but resided in the field house. She got a three-game basketball suspension for putting a shoulder in the back of a New Rochelle forward who’d elbowed Patty’s teammate Stephanie, and she still broke every school record she’d set the previous year, plus nearly broke the scoring record. Augmenting her reliable perimeter shooting was a growing taste for driving to the basket. She was no longer on speaking terms with physical pain.

      In the spring, when the local state assemblyman stepped down after long service and the party leadership chose Patty’s mother to run as his replacement, the Posts offered to co-host a fund-raiser in the green luxury of their back yard. Joyce sought Patty’s permission before she accepted the offer, saying she wouldn’t do anything that Patty wasn’t comfortable with, but Patty was beyond caring what Joyce did, and told her so. When the candidate’s family stood for the obligatory family photo, no grief was given to Patty for absenting herself. Her look of bitterness would not have helped Joyce’s cause.

      Chapter 2: Best Friends

      Based on her inability to recall her state of consciousness in her first three years at college, the autobiographer suspects she simply didn’t have a state of consciousness. She had the sensation of being awake but in fact she must have been sleepwalking. Otherwise it’s hard to understand how, to take one example, she became intense best friends with a disturbed girl who was basically her stalker.

      Some of the fault—although the autobiographer hates to say it—may lie with Big Ten athletics and the artificial world it created for participating students, for boys especially, but also, even in the late 1970s, for girls. Patty went out to Minnesota in July for special jock summer camp followed by special, early, jocks-only freshman orientation, and then she lived in a jock dorm, made exclusively jock friends, ate exclusively at jock tables, cluster-danced at parties with her jock teammates, and was careful never to sign up for a class without plenty of other jocks to sit with and (time permitting) study with. Jocks didn’t absolutely have to live this way, but the majority at Minnesota did, and Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester! “You should go wherever you want,” Joyce had said to Patty, by which she’d meant: it is grotesque and repulsive to attend a mediocre state school like Minnesota when you have great offers from Vanderbilt and Northwestern (which are also more flattering to me). “This is entirely your personal decision, and we will support you in whatever you decide,” Joyce had said, by which she’d meant: don’t blame me and Daddy when you ruin your life with stupid decisions. Joyce’s transparent aversion to Minnesota, along with Minnesota’s distance from New York, was a key factor in Patty’s deciding to go there. Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to be basketball.

      The first of the nonjocks to lure her out of this cult and become important to her was the disturbed girl Eliza, who Patty, of course, initially had no idea was disturbed. Eliza was exactly half pretty. Her head started out gorgeous on top and got steadily worse-looking the lower down you looked. She had wonderfully thick and curly brown hair and amazing huge eyes, and then a cute enough little button nose, but then around her mouth her face got smooshed up and miniature in a disturbing sort of preemie way, and she had very little chin. She was always wearing baggy corduroys that slid down on her hips, and tight short-sleeved shirts that she bought in Boys departments at thrift stores and buttoned only the middle buttons of, and red Keds, and a big avocado-green shearling coat. She smelled like an ashtray but tried not to smoke around Patty unless they were outside. In an irony then invisible to Patty but now plenty visible to the autobiographer, Eliza had a lot in common with Patty’s arty little sisters. She owned a black electric guitar and a dear small amp, but the few times Patty convinced her to play it in her presence Eliza became furious with her, which almost never happened otherwise (at least not at first). She said Patty was making her feel pressured and self-conscious and this was why she kept fucking up after only a few bars of her song. She ordered Patty to not be so obviously listening, but even when Patty turned away and pretended to read a magazine it wasn’t good enough. Eliza swore that the minute Patty was out of the room again she’d be able to play her song perfectly. “But now? Forget it.”

      “I’m sorry,”