There had been one bright spot in my life in California:

My very first day of eighth grade at Garfield Junior High—now Martin Luther King Middle School—my homeroom teacher asked the girl two desks in front of me to help me find my classes and show me around the school. Her name was Linda, a carrot-top like me, and though we couldn’t have looked more different, because of our hair strangers would ask if we were sisters. But hers was bright, while mine was pale; her eyes were hazel, while mine were blue; her skin was creamy, while mine was freckled; her nose was straight and bold, while mine was crooked and nondescript. At lunchtime she introduced me to two of her friends, Daryl and Nikki—all three of them children of divorce, though Linda was the only one who lived with her father. (In St. Anthony Park, I hadn’t known any kids whose parents were divorced.)

It was Daryl I was drawn to from the beginning, both for her gentle manner and her sense of humor, which jibed with mine in a way I’d never experienced with anyone before. She began asking me over for dinner on Fridays, and her home became a haven for me. She lived with her writer mother, Nancy, who walked with a limp, and who, like Daryl, had a gentle way about her. Their house was in the Berkeley Hills. From their picture window, in the evening, you could see a panoramic view of the bay, a sea of twinkling lights in the foreground, the San Francisco skyline and Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. A typical dinner was steak—which my family couldn’t afford—and red leaf lettuce salad, which seemed very elegant to me because all I’d ever eaten was iceberg lettuce. They had a tiered yard and garden in back, and their living room was spacious enough for us to do modern dance in. Nancy even hired a dance teacher to give us lessons. In Minnesota, I’d started going to the Unitarian Church in Minneapolis in seventh grade with my friend Mary and her family, as I’ve mentioned. In Berkeley, Daryl and I started going to the Unitarian Church in Kensington, a modern gray stone structure with an atrium, rubber trees, and an even more spectacular view of the Bay Area cities because it was on the very highest ridge of the East Bay hills.

From my mom, who got to know Nancy, I learned that Daryl’s father was a musician and that Nancy’s lameness had been an issue in their marriage. Though it would be years before I knew I was meant to be a writer, I felt a comfort and affinity with Nancy. What I didn’t know was that, unlike my own mother, she recognized who I was and understood that my life was likely to be a difficult one. Only as an adult would I learn that my mother had always viewed me as so talented that I “would never want for anything,” including—apparently—attention, understanding, empathy, and encouragement. Nancy, on the other hand, had expressed to my mom the opinion that I was an artist and would suffer. “Talents aren’t assets that lift you above want or need,” I would tell my mother as an adult. “They’re hungers—and if they’re not fed, you’re likely to become as emotionally blighted as a starved child is physically blighted.”

What I couldn’t foresee, as I headed back to California from Minnesota at the end of my summer with my father, was that my safe harbor with Daryl and Nancy had only been a temporary one.

In ninth grade, Linda’s father decided to send her to a home for delinquent girls in Oakland. He’d recently remarried—a woman with two daughters—and believed that Linda was trying to sabotage his relationship with his new wife and stepdaughters. So beginning in ninth grade, Daryl invited Linda to live with her—and I don’t remember ever visiting her home again. I also know from my mom that Nancy found Linda difficult and was deeply distressed about her staying with them, but Daryl remained staunchly loyal to our mutual friend, and she and I were never close again.