Joanie Cagney likes Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the Beach Boys, just like I do. She’s got their albums stacked faceup on a wide shelf below her stereo. I have the Beatles first album, but I’m at the mercy of the radio for the others. I met Joanie last year, in seventh grade, but we only got friendly as school started this year. We eat lunch together, hang out sometimes after school. She’s smart, a good kid. My mother likes her. 

I do too, but sometimes she gets kind of serious. Like yesterday. We were in her room. The walls are baby blue, with ruffled curtains that match her bedspread and she’s even got a desk. The room is all  her own. She doesn’t have to share it with anyone. She’s not an only child, but she has only one brother, who’s already in college. I’m not really jealous, just amazed. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have a room of my own, a desk where I could write my poems and stories and not have to hide them when I’m done.

I was sitting on the edge of her bed, reading the jacket copy on the book her mother just bought her, Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith. 

“Have you  started it yet?” I said.

“Last night.”

“So?”

“It’s okay, I guess. I didn’t get very far. My mom picked it out. It’s probably  corny.”

“Smith wrote a A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That wasn’t corny.” I loved that book. I’d never come across anyone— in a book or real life—who was a building janitor, like my mom. The girl’s mother got a discount on the rent just like mine used to when we lived in the basement apartment. I opened to the first page of Joy, started reading, but it didn’t sound anything like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. 

Joanie has lots of books in her room, and they’re not even library books. They’re from the bookstore. Her mom has bookshelves in the living room and along the hallway. I try to imagine having that many books of my own someday. Almost all the books I read are from the library. Mrs. Cagney says I’m welcome to borrow hers, but I’m nervous about it. I’m afraid I’ll spill soda on the pages or get the jackets creased. She loaned me Go Tell It on the Mountain, and I kept it wrapped in a towel when I wasn’t reading it.

“My mom says you liked that book because the family is so poor,” Joanie said.

“What book?”

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

“Your mother said that?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, that’s not the reason. Smith is a really good writer.”

I put the book down and knelt in front of her record shelf because I didn’t want to hear any more about poor people. For a few minutes, Joanie didn’t say anything. Then she did, like out of nowhere. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you’ll always tell me the truth.” Her voice was soft, the words like a wish. 

I didn’t know what to say. I hoped her mother would walk in, but she hardly ever does. I’m getting used to it now, but the first time I went to Joanie’s house, I was amazed at how much privacy she has. The first time I hung out there, I kept expecting her mom to make us sit in the living room, the way my mom would. Like when my sister Irene brought her friend Barbara over that day, and they went into our bedroom and closed the door. “What have you got to hide?” Mama told her. Irene just rolled her eyes, didn’t argue, but that was the last time she brought Barbara to the house.

I don’t know what Irene was thinking. Privacy never happens in my family. As far back as I can remember, it’s been too many people in such a small space. Even now, with all my older siblings married and gone, our place is so small nobody gets to be alone. Four of us in a two-bedroom apartment. When I want to be by myself to write, I have to wait until the television goes on after dinner and do it at the kitchen table. Even then, my mother doesn’t like it much. She likes us to settle in with her, with the living room dimmed, all eyes on the TV screen. She pulls down the shades so the world outside can’t get in, because it worries and upsets her, the good and the bad of it.

When Joanie said it again, the promise-me stuff, I didn’t want to look at her. I stood up, with Dylan’s album cover in my hand, pretending she hadn’t said anything important. 

But she said it again, daring me, challenging me to something that can rarely happen with me. In so many ways, my whole self is a lie. It’s the way I live. I pretend. I’m a name on an assignment paper, the girl in the third seat in the fifth row, but beyond that I don’t claim anything, because there’s so little I can be sure I’ll get back. It’s better not to expect much, not even a hello. 

That’s how I get by every time I have to transfer to a new school. This is my thirteenth in eight years. I pretend I don’t need other people. If I let my guard down, I’ll get it in the teeth. Like in sixth grade, when I got used to the spot next to Ellen Reynolds in math class that first couple of weeks. She was starting to talk to me. She was pretty much the only person who did. I thought maybe we could be friends. Then Mrs. Kirshin moved our seats; it was time to “move the chess pieces,” she said, like she had some ancient set of rules for running a class. Marilyn Podswicki got put next to me, so I smiled at her, but she made such a point of turning away that I froze, right along with the stupid grin on my face. I wanted to say hello, just to spite her, but my throat was so tight I couldn’t make sounds come out. I looked over at Ellen. She was chatting away with her new neighbor, more friendly than she’d ever been with me. I felt like a dirty tissue, used up.

I don’t know the right name for feelings like that when they come, but I’m pretty good now at getting rid of them when they do. They make me feel like a baby, like I need someone to comfort me or make things turn out differently. The point is I’ve learned—and I’m not sure when I first figured this out—that nobody really cares how I feel or how things are for me. And even if they do—because sometimes I’m sure my mother does care—there’s nothing they can do to change things. Nothing. So I’m better off pretending.

Joanie was waiting for me to answer her. She was sitting backwards in her desk chair, her arms crossed over the back of it, her chin resting on her forearm. Long strands of her dark hair had escaped her barrette at the nap of her neck and she seemed so relaxed, like it didn’t matter how she looked when it was just us two. When I’m with Joanie I feel like I’m really there, the real me, not someone I’ve put together to get by for the moment. But she’s seen only bits and pieces of me, and I was afraid to promise her that I’ll never lie, never cover up. I’m not sure I’d really know how to do that. But I promised anyway, not because I think I can, but because she really wanted me to.

It made her smile and she got up and turned up the volume on the record player. Bob Dylan was singing, How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man? He sounds old to me when he sings it, although I know he isn’t. It’s not his voice really, but the tone, the attitude in it, like he knows there’s barely any point in asking the question. Peter, Paul & Mary sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” like they’re angry, like they’re fed up with how long some things have to go on before somebody changes something. But Dylan sings like he knows that things can stay really bad pretty much forever.

Joanie is only a year younger than me. But I could see by the way she started singing along, by the kindness in her face and how willing she was to believe me, that she’s really just a kid.