Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop

the ribs jutted to one side, the breasts and hips became uneven, and one shoulder tilted up high toward the ear. Every teenage girl should be checked annually for curvature of the spine, Anne said, which led to a rush on Nurse Palmer’s office the week the piece was printed.
    And in my profile on Christy Lee, the near-invisible lone black student in our sophomore class, she revealed how she had managed to trace her family roots all the way back to the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a slave trader named Captain Burt Keenan who had sold her great-great-great-grandfather, branded and chained, to a plantation owner in Charleston for two thousand dollars—which, Christy pointed out, was actually a high price to pay for a man in those days. Christy provided the title herself for that piece: “Let Freedom Ring.”
    The charity cases seemed to become a little less shy after their articles were published, a little less bitter. Girls would stop at our lunch table to get Soo Chee Chong to write their names in Chinese characters on the front of their notebooks. From time to time I even saw Anne Harding laughing aloud in the hallway, her chin bobbling against her neck brace. The journalism students at LSU had been right. There was power in writing. Words held magic that could transform people.
    That spring, too, Chip Benton started to become a regular at our tiny newspaper staff office. He was always dropping off photos of CHS events we might use, or offering us extra bottles of toner solution. We had our own school photographers, of course, but Chip was such a good-natured fellow, and his curly helmet of hair was so cute—and he was a boy, after all, which was such a weird novelty at SHA—that we were always happy to have him around.
    And true to his word, he gave me signed prints of the photos he took of me that night at the Italian restaurant. He’d blown them up and developed and cropped them in such a way that they looked moody and evocative, like stills from a 1950s black-and-white movie, or celebrity nightclub photos from an era more glamorous and richly lived than our own. They were gorgeous, really—funny and profound, silly and tender all at once. I kept them in a desk drawer in my dorm room. I didn’t dare put them up on the walls—they seemed too intimate, somehow—but from time to time I took them out to admire them.

    I was adapting so well to life at Sacred Heart that year, in fact, that I hated to return to Zachary for the summer. But once the school year ended and the dorm shut down, we boarders had no choice. I packed all my belongings into boxes again and moved back home, where a kind of silent truce prevailed between me and my parents. I’d decided that as long as I had to live with them I would be polite, nothing more. My personal life was my own business from now on; I wasn’t going to risk sharing anything with them ever again. When they asked how things were going at school, I’d say, “Fine.” At dinner, it was “Pass the butter, please” and “Thank you.” My father hardly seemed to notice this dearth of communication. My mother, though, more attuned, would stop by my room after dinner.
    “Is everything all right, Laura?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you enjoying your summer?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well …” She watched me a moment longer from the doorway, her dark eyes twitching in their sockets. “Nice to have you back. Good night.”
    “Night.”
    Listening to her steps creaking down the hallway from my room, I could feel the distance between us growing, and I wondered if this distance would grow so great that eventually, passing through opposite doors of the parlor or brushing shoulders on the way to and from the bathroom, we might be no more familiar to one another than strangers at a bus station, bound for different destinations.
    Every week or so, I went alone to Jack Prejean’s shop to check for mail from Tim. That was our arrangement: during the school year, Tim would write to me at SHA, and