It got to where Abigail even witnessed herself. She floated like a spirit above her own right shoulder, noting herself in act or word. Many engage in this sort of self-examination, especially girls especially in adolescence, but few are as adept and distinctive in the disconnection. Without any pathology or problem, Abigail managed to watch herself and even enjoy her own embarrassments. (She was able to retain the separation well into adulthood. It passed unremarked, the way a headache does, sometime in her forties. That spirit at her shoulder merged into the rest of her without fanfare, but she retained some ability to laugh at herself.)

She was surprised but not shocked when Selena’s mother killed herself. It was only a few months after Abigail saw her with Kevin, and things had always been volatile in Selena’s household. The family was from the South, with wonderful traditions about music and hospitality, but the parents drank strange cocktails, and fought loudly and often. Their back porch faced Abigail’s bedroom window, and she often heard the arguments.

She knew about suicide from “Madama Butterfly.” It was her father’s favorite opera, and he’d had her watch it with him, on television, when she was five. She hadn’t minded the odd loud singing, and she rather liked the music, but she’d been completely blown away at the ending. She couldn’t understand how something called “entertainment” could have a sad ending.

So she wasn’t shocked when Selena’s mother killed herself. But she was very sad. And she wasn’t at all prepared for Selena to show up pregnant, by (spitball) Pete of all people. Selena and her father moved back to the South.

Abigail didn’t do much steady catching after that. She went to junior high school, and bigger fields of play. Perched like an angel on her own shoulder, she watched others, she watched herself, and she took notes.

She became a counselor for her peers. Something about her invited confidences; girls and boys both came to her with their stories, and she gave advice about sex and romance, studies and cheating, philosophy and science. She soon realized that everyone else was at least as insecure as she was, and trying to hide weakness from others. What mystified Abigail was the way everyone else seemed to believe the weaknesses could be hidden.

She read voraciously. She took her models more from books than from people, because the people around her seemed amnesiac or timid.

There were no worthy girl examples in her environment, and by fourteen she gave up any idea of being a boy. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that she had her first period (finally) three months after her fourteenth birthday. It certainly wasn’t a coincidence that, according to her lockable diary for 1964, she started her first diet two weeks before she saw her that menstrual blood.

She read several books a week. She despised the story characters who responded passively to life (Candide) or who whined (Hamlet). She loved challenged individuals, like Howard Roark or the circumscribed Lizzie Bennett. She tried imagining and building the female she wanted to be.

In time, Abigail even fell in love and married. That she didn’t do these things with the same individual is probably the only deep disappointment in her life. She fell for Owen in college, but she couldn’t keep him after he broke apart. His mother’s suicide precipitated his own psychosis, and Abigail turned to the easy comfort of her friend Bill, for marriage and (memorable) parenting and (amicable) divorce.

She is still taking notes. She continues to observe. She writes some of her own story now, and then she reads about a young woman called Biga or Abigail. She knows the character lived her days with attention and passion, but on paper Abigail seems passive and reactive. This disturbs her; it makes her wonder if she was incorrect about Candide and Hamlet, or inaccurate about portraying herself. She’s beyond middle age but lately she feels like she’s stepped behind a dedicated batter, and she’s steadily catching herself.