“I’m glad you’re my sister,” Gracie said sadly. “I wish you weren’t going away to college, and that you had stayed here.”

“I do too, when I think about leaving you. But I’ll come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and you can come to visit me.”

“It won’t be the same,” Gracie said as a tear sneaked down her cheek, and they both knew it was true.

The whole family looked like they were in mourning when Victoria packed her bags for college. And the night before she left, her father took them all out to dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and they had a good time together. There were no jokes that night at anyone’s expense. And the next day, all three of them took her to the airport, and the moment they got out of the car, Gracie burst into tears and threw her arms around Victoria’s waist.

Her father checked in her luggage, while the two girls stood crying on the sidewalk, and Christine looked at her daughter unhappily.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” she said softly. She would have liked to try again if she had the chance. She could feel Victoria slipping through her fingers forever. She had never really thought about what this day would feel like. The pain of it took her by surprise now.

“I’ll be home soon,” Victoria said, and hugged her, still crying, and then she hugged her little sister again. “I’ll call you tonight,” she promised her, “as soon as I get to my room.” Gracie nodded and couldn’t stop crying, and even her father’s eyes were damp when he said goodbye to her in a choked voice.

“Take care of yourself. Call if you need anything. And if you hate it, you can always transfer to a school out here.” He hoped she would. It was as though her leaving California for college were a rejection of him. They had wanted her to stay in L.A., or close to it, which wasn’t what Victoria wanted or needed.

After kissing them all again, Victoria went through security, and waved for as long as she could see them. They didn’t leave the airport until she had disappeared from sight. The last she saw of her family was Gracie leaving the airport, walking between her parents. They all looked the same, with their dark hair and slim bodies. Her mother was holding Gracie’s hand, and Victoria could see that her sister was still crying.

She boarded the flight to Chicago, thinking about all of them, and as the plane took off, she looked out the window at the city she was fleeing, to find the tools she needed for a new life somewhere else. She didn’t know where that would be, but the one thing she did know was that it couldn’t be here, or with them.

Victoria’s years in college were exactly what she hoped they would be. The school was even better than she had dreamed or expected. It was big and sprawling, and the classes she took and did well at were her ticket to freedom. She wanted to acquire the skills she needed to have a job and a life someplace other than L.A. She missed Gracie, and sometimes even her parents, but when she thought of living with her parents, every fiber of her being told her that she could never live with them again. And she loved her frequent visits to Chicago and discovering everything she could about the city. It was lively and sophisticated, and she thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the brutally cold weather.

She went home for Thanksgiving freshman year, and saw instantly that Grace had grown taller, and prettier, if that was even possible. Her mother had finally relented and let her do a commercial for Gap Kids. Grace’s photograph was suddenly everywhere, and she could have had a career as a model, but her father wanted a better life for her. And he swore that he’d never let a child of his go to college so far from home again. He told Grace that she’d have to go to UCLA, Pepperdine, Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, or USC. He was not going to let her leave L.A. In his own way, he genuinely missed Victoria. He didn’t have much to say when she called, except that he hoped she’d come home soon, and then he passed the phone to her mother, who asked what she was doing and if she’d lost any weight. It was the question Victoria hated most because she hadn’t. And then she dieted frantically for two weeks before she went home.

And when she got back to L.A. for Christmas vacation, her mother noticed that she had lost a little weight. She had been working out at the gym at school, but she admitted that she hadn’t had any dates. She was working too hard at school to even care. She told them she had decided to get a teaching degree, and her father instantly disapproved. It gave them a new topic to disagree on, and distracted them from her weight and lack of dates.

“You’ll never make decent money as a teacher. You should major in communications, and work in advertising or PR. I can get you a job.” She knew he meant well, but it wasn’t what she wanted to do. She liked the idea of teaching, and working with kids. She changed the subject and they talked about how cold it was in the Midwest-she hadn’t even been able to imagine it until she was there. It had been well below zero for the whole week before she came home. And she was enjoying going to hockey games. She wasn’t crazy about her roommate, but she was determined to make the best of it. And she had met some people in her dorm. But mostly, she was trying to get accustomed to the school, and to being away from home. She said she missed decent food, and this time no one commented when she took three helpings of pot roast. And she was happy taking time off from going to the gym while she was home. She appreciated the weather in L.A. as she never had before.

Her father gave her a new computer for Christmas, and her mother gave her a down coat. Gracie had made her a montage of photographs of them, starting when she was born, on a bulletin board to hang up in her dorm room. And when she left after Christmas, Victoria wasn’t sure if she was coming home for spring break. She said she might travel somewhere with friends. In fact, she wanted to go to New York and try to line up a summer job, but she didn’t mention it to them. Her father said that if she didn’t come home in March, they would come to see her after that, and take her to Chicago for the weekend. And it was even harder leaving Gracie that time. The two sisters genuinely missed each other, and her parents said they missed her too.

Second semester of freshman year was hard for Victoria too. The midwestern winter was dreary and cold, she was lonely, she hadn’t met many people, she had no close friends yet, and she caught a bad case of flu in January. When she did, she lost the thread of going to the gym again and started living on fast food. By the end of second semester, she had gained the dreaded freshman fifteen, and none of the clothes she had brought with her fit anymore. She felt huge, and was twenty-five pounds overweight. She had no choice but to start working out again, and she swam every day. She managed to lose ten pounds of the extra weight fairly quickly, with a purging diet, and some pills one of her dorm mates had given her that made her desperately sick. But she could get into her clothes again, and she was thinking about going to Weight Watchers to lose the other fifteen, but she always had an excuse not to. She was busy, it was cold, she had a paper due. It was a constant battle with her weight. And even without her mother hounding her, and her father making fun of her, she was unhappy about her size, and she didn’t have a date all year.

She went to New York as she hoped to over spring break, and managed to get a job as a receptionist at a law firm for the summer. The pay was decent, and she could hardly wait. She didn’t tell her family about it till May, and Gracie called her sobbing on the phone. She had just turned twelve, and Victoria nineteen.

“I want you to come home! I don’t want you to go to New York.”

“I’m coming home in August before I go back to school,” she promised, but Gracie was sad that she wasn’t coming home till then. She had just done another ad, for a national campaign. Her parents were putting the money away in trust for her, and she liked the modeling and thought it was fun. But she missed her sister. Life at home wasn’t nearly as much fun without her.

They had also met Victoria in Chicago, as they’d promised, for a long weekend in April, and it had snowed. It had been a seemingly endless winter, and when Victoria finally finished her exams, she was excited to fly out of Chicago on Memorial Day weekend. She was starting work in New York the day after Memorial Day.

She had bought some skirts and blouses and summer dresses that were appropriate for her job at the law firm. And she had gotten her weight back in control again by not eating any desserts or bread or pasta. It was a low-carb diet that seemed to be working. It was heading in the right direction at least, and she hadn’t eaten ice cream in a month. Her mother would have been proud of her. It had also occurred to her that while her mother complained about what she ate, she had always kept a hefty supply of ice cream in the freezer. And she had served all the fattening things Victoria liked to eat. She had always put temptation in Victoria’s way. At least now she could only blame herself for what she ate, Victoria told herself. And she was trying to be diligent and sensible about it, without going on any crazy diets, or borrowing someone else’s pills. She hadn’t had time to go to Weight Watchers yet, but she had promised herself that she would walk to work every day in New York. She was going to be working on Park Avenue and East 53rd Street, and staying at a small residential hotel in Gramercy Park, which was a thirty-block hike to work, a mile and a half. Three miles if she walked both ways.

Victoria liked her summer job. The people at the law firm were nice to her. She was competent, responsible, and efficient. Mostly, she answered the phones, handed envelopes to messengers, or accepted them for the lawyers in the firm. She directed clients to attorneys’ offices, took messages, and greeted people at the front desk. It was an easy but busy job, and most days she wound up staying late. And by the time she left, in the torrid summer heat, she was too tired to walk home, so she took the subway back to Gramercy Park. But she managed to walk to work on the days she wasn’t late, at least some of the time. When it took longer than she’d planned to get dressed or do her hair, she’d have to take the subway to work, so she wouldn’t be late.