It was a sweet existence in many ways. I had my loving and beautiful boyfriend Dave, who was sort of a rock star and also the nicest boyfriend I’d ever had. I had work—nude modeling and shifting boxes in a warehouse, not at the same time. There were shows and beaches and long days filled with nothing but reading. When I got restless or Dave was on tour, I hopped trains up and down the coast with a couple of daredevil pals I’d made. But I knew I was supposed to be a student. I wrote in my diary: “Last night I dreamt I was late for school—and how!” Which was funny, but I didn’t feel funny. I felt like I was twenty-two and a college dropout twice over and getting older every day in the wrong hemisphere. I truly believed I would live outside bourgeois society for the rest of my days, nude modeling and warehouse laboring. Maybe I would get promoted to forklift driver. There was nothing in me that believed that the normal things that happened to normal people were things that were going to happen to me. I looked like a free girl—after all, I stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked all the way to Queensland—but at this point I believed I was worthless, pretty much, except maybe my looks, and I don’t think a worthless-feeling person is a free person. I read exhaustively. From Tolstoy I’d moved on to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and, of all people, Doris Lessing, who made me think in uncomfortably explicit ways about girls and freedom, and the difficulty of the novels was the only thing keeping me from falling into total despair. My brain was a little hammer, looking for somewhere to fall.

“Sometimes life is a thing of determination,” I wrote in my diary that first winter when I returned to school. “And when you are determined, you are free.” Too right, mate. I looked like a bigger fuckup than ever: the heavy blackout drinking, the promiscuity, the mad butter eating. But my life had become a thing of determination, and so it came to pass that I finally escaped the terrible surrender of will that marked my adolescence. I was no longer ruled by boys but by myself.

That night as I fell asleep I thought about Victoria. “Thought” is a strong word. What I did was, I felt. It was rare for a friend to make me feel. And what I felt was that I wanted her friendship. A strong wanting. The kind of wanting I usually reserved for sex and love. Now it was coming, bam, in the middle of the night and with that forcefulness I knew all too well, but it was about a new thing, about this friend. I wanted to change my life, to be worthy of her. Also, I wanted to be a Hegelian because that was the smartest thing I could think of. That would be the new me: Hegelian and friend of Vic. That was all I wanted. But how to go about it? The Hegel part was easy; just read some Hegel. Okay, not that easy. The Vic part I was going to have to work at.

I stopped speaking to Dave altogether. Sometimes I think that moment she said “Why don’t you sit next to your own boyfriend” was the most important moment in my entire life; not just because it led to the most important friendship I will ever have but because she explained so succinctly how to be a friend. How to stop living for boys.

I mounted a charm offensive and eventually wore her down—several months later we went on our first friend date. She picked me up in her Impala and drove me to see Thelma and Louise at the Guild 45th in Wallingford. I thought Brad Pitt was kinda hot; she wasn’t so sure. At the time, we didn’t see our destiny in those two ladies—who seemed old to us—driving off into the sunset together.