This is a line from Victoria Holt’s gothic romance but it pretty much summed up my own feelings about being a teenager living on a lonely Pennsylvania mountainside in the late 1980s. Flopped on my bed in the house trailer I shared with my mom and brother, I devoured dozens of Holt’s gothic romances, titles like , , and The gothic formula goes like this: a young woman falls on hard times and must make her way in the world alone. Usually as a governess, but sometimes as lady’s maid, music teacher, portrait painter, housekeeper, or companion for a strange, secretive family on an isolated estate far from her own family and friends.
Here in my cramped room on the mountainside, with the box fan whirring in the window to block out the view of the rusting horse trailer and the barrel where we burned our trash, I was isolated too. I had no neighbors, and I couldn’t get anywhere without a car—which I didn’t have. I spent most of my time trapped in a home surrounded by wilderness, just like those governesses in crumbling manors at the edge of the wily, windy moors.
My best friend had dumped me at the end of sixth grade the year before, and I entered junior high as a raw egg without a shell, a quivering yolk who tried to hide behind badly permed hair and drugstore eyeshadow. I saved every penny to buy the right clothes, the rugby-style shirts, the high-top aerobic sneakers with Velcro tabs wrapping the ankle, the two pairs of slouchy socks to tuck my acid-washed jeans into. N.
