She is thirteen, and just beginning to realize her power.

I'd left home by then.

Boarding school is my way out. By seventh grade, pamphlets have begun to arrive. Daddy has his heart set on Farmington, where Jackie Onassis went, but I fall in love with the quaint little school by the Sudbury River in Massachusetts. The day we visit, the autumn foliage is at full pitch and the shouts of girls on the hockey field float in through the open windows. We tour the fancy new performing arts center with its bubble dome, the white clapboard chapel that once was the centerpiece of a Vermont town (it was shipped down piece by piece and rebuilt by students), the dining hall with its French windows and pepper mills on each table. But what steals my heart is the art studio, with the skylight and balcony where you can go out and sketch on sunny days.

"That's where I'm going," I announce on the car ride back. In the rearview mirror I see my large face foreshortened with my hair whipping about in the draft from the open window.

"Get in first," Daddy says.

"I'll get in." It's the first time in my life I've ever been so sure of anything.

Before I know it, it's August, the month before I leave, but no one is paying attention to me because they're excited about the new house we just bought. It's on Woodside Avenue, a much fancier neighborhood than Coram Drive, closer to Yale. The down payment came from the sale of some land that my parents bought in Monterey and kept all these years. Some big developers want to build a spa there. The move will take place in September, while I'm away.

There are open boxes all over the place and Ma's frantically going through her lists. Marty has to remind her we need school clothes. Saturday afternoon we're off to the mall in our gold Ford Fairlane, my sister in the front seat next to Ma, her bare forearm lying along the open window. I listen to them arguing about the radio.

"No wah-wah-wah music," Ma says.

"It's good stuff," my sister snaps. Overnight she's become sophisticated, spouting off the names of foreign sports cars and haute couture designers. She goes to the kinds of parties to which I'm not invited. One time she's dropped off after midnight, drunk, and I have to sneak her into the bathroom to wash the puke out of her hair. She keeps giggling and I tell her to shut up, she'll wake Ma and Daddy. "Oh, Sally, you're so boring," she hisses at me in a stage whisper. "Fucking afraid of your own shadow."

Marty wins the music fight, and "Sugar Magnolia" floats back to me in snatches. "Isn't this pretty?" she asks.

"No meaning," says Ma.

She makes us start at Alexander's. Marty groans. "There's not a single item of clothing in here I'd be caught dead in," she pronounces. "Not even a sock." She looks at me for support.

"Not even underwear," I say.

"Stop it," my mother says sharply. "Sally, I'm surprised at you."

We spin circular racks of skirts and sweaters that are all heavy on burgundy, navy, and forest green, like the banners of Ivy League schools. My mother automatically picks out the same things for Marty and me to try on, as if we were twins. She holds up two kilts in our respective sizes, both in the same burgundy and blue tartan.

Marty barely gives them a glance. "Geeky, Ma." My mother hands me the one in my size and I take it because it seems like something a boarding-school girl would wear.

After Alexander's Marty wants to go to Casual Corner. A rock station blasts away in the background and the saleswomen stand around like poles, gossiping and jingling their silver bangles. My sister heads straight for the angora sweaters, and my mother, after a considering glance around, starts poking through a rack marked SALE. I pick out the first thing that catches my eyea"overall shortsa"but when I try them on Ma says: "They don't bring out your best features." She means they make my legs look fat. Marty ends up with a couple of tight sweaters and a miniskirt. Ma puts her foot down about a gold chiffon scarf. "Looks cheap." Like the other stuff doesn't.

When we get home Daddy is in the living room reading. My sister crackles her shopping bags at him. "Look what we got."

Our father doesn't look up. "You spend too much money."

I don't say anything. Daddy and I never talk unless it's absolutely necessary and then only with my mother around.

The phone rings. It's for Marty, it's always for Marty.

"Hello?" she answers in that breathless voice she saves for boys, then she pulls the phone into the hall closet and closes the door as far as she can.

I go upstairs to try on my new clothes. I draw the blindsa"David Katz probably isn't home on a Saturday afternoon but you never knowa"and put on the kilt and the cream blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons I got to match it. The mirror over our dresser is so short I can only see down to the tops of my thighs, but I think it looks okay. I crack open the door to the hall and it seems like everyone's still downstairs. It's safe to go to my parents' room to use the full-length mirror on their closet door.

Standing there, I fold up the kilt hem to see how I would look in a miniskirt and decide that Ma is right, I don't have the figure for short. My hips have swollen so fast I can barely fit into my skirts from last year, but I'm still so flat I don't need a bra, unlike my sister, who's almost up to B already, even got her period before me. I unbutton the blouse halfway and scrutinize myself. Even when I press my breasts together I have nothing that can possibly be construed as cleavage.

I don't hear the door open. I don't know anyone is there until I hear his sound, a kind of gasped grunt. His face is in the mirror behind me, eyebrows drawn down into a V, mouth slack. The expression is disgust.

I pull the blouse shut and whip past my father, down the hall, back to my own room and into the closet where I sit hunched on the floor, hands crossed over my chest, willing my heart to stop pounding. Out the window I notice the Cuddy twins, Michael and Shauna, wheeling around the dead-end circle on their battered tricycles. They look ridiculous.

I hate my body. It's too big, it was always too big. I want to be small like my mother and sister. At boarding school they won't care that I'm built like a boy except for my fat hips and thighs. I'll be an artist. How I look won't matter. One more month. One more month and I'll be out of here forever.

From downstairs I can hear my sister shrieking with laughter.

The week before I leave I decide to cut my hair. Darcy Katz does it for me in her pink room in front of the vanity mirror. "You sure?" she keeps asking over and over again until I want to scream. She cuts it in degrees, in case I change my mind, first to the middle of my back, and then, when I insist, all the way up to the nape. I wrap the snakelike hanks in tissue paper and hide them in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

At boarding school I make the best friend of my life: redheaded Frances Fischel, whose parents are divorced. Her father lives in the Virgin Islands with his new, much younger wife while her nutty mother languishes in a barn of an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Fran always has a supply of the best hash money can buy, thanks to the generous guilt allowance she gets from her father. After night study hall, the two of us go down by the river to get high sitting on the cold rocks among the willows. A few yellow house lights glimmer remotely across the water from us. When the hash is laced with acid the lights break free like fireflies, streaming up into the violet sky. The first time this happens it freaks me out, but then I get used to it, even try to draw it from memory.

The two of us develop elaborate philosophies. I'm going to be a painter and she's going to be a poet. We make a pact to wear only silver jewelry for the rest of our lives. Silver represents dedication to art, while gold stands for worldly things.

The first time I go home is for Thanksgiving vacation. It feels like a dream. For one thing, we've moved from Coram Drive to the rambling Tudor house on the hill. On the way home from the train station Ma tells me: "So much trouble to move! You should be here to help. But now everything's fine, we're all settled in. Your daddy's study is so beautiful, with wood panel."

But when we pull up he's not in his study, but down in our new living room, ensconced in his old oxblood chair with his Chinese newspapers.

"Hi," I say.

He mutters something about my hair, which has grown out ragged to my chin.

I go upstairs and open the first bedroom door I come to, which turns out to be my sister's. She's lying on her bed talking on her new Princess phone. "Hey!" she says, annoyed.

"Sorry." I close the door.

Later, when she comes into my room, she pulls aface.

"You have zits."

"So."

"You shouldn't eat chocolate. I bet you stuff your face at that school."

"Up.yours," I say, an expression I picked up from Fran. It surprises Marty.

"Uh-huh. Well, you missed all the excitement. The move and everything. I got the best room."

"Like I care."

She smiles at me secretively and leaves.

My first night home, Ma makes my favorite dinner: spaghetti and lima beans. We've just started to eat when Daddy begins talking. Not to me exactly. It's more like a quiz. Nothing's changed.

"How you doing in your subjects at school?"

"Fine."

"You get all As this semester?"

"We haven't gotten our report cards yet."

"How about tests? You get As on your tests?"

"Yes," I lie.

Marty has picked up her plate and is leaning across to shovel her lima beans into mine, as she has done since we were children. I let her because even though she's acting like a jerk, she's still my sister.

"Mar-tee isn't doing so well," Daddy announces.

"Daddy," Ma says.

"I think she wants to be a dropout. I think she doesn't care about getting into a good school like her jie-jie."

"I don't want to go to boarding school. I want to stay at home."

"Stay at home and fool around."

My sister lets out a sigh that flutters her bangs.

There's a silence, and then my mother says brightly: "Marty has star part in the Christmas pageant."

"I'm the Virgin Mary." My sister's smile is ironic.

"I won a prize," I say casually.

"Oh, what?" Ma asks.

"It was for a pastel drawing. They chose from the whole freshman class. They're going to put it in the spring art show."

Daddy clears his throat. "Yale only takes the best grade point average."

Ma nods. "When I was young, you know what I wanted to be? A neurologist. I wanted to learn all about the brain and nervous system and perform surgery."

My sister and I exchange glances. This is news to us.

"You could become academic, do research," Daddy suggests to me.

"I don't like math."

"Who's talking about math? This is science."

I don't want to be you, I think. Never. I hate you. My father is sucking up his spaghetti like Chinese noodles. I think how ashamed I would be if Fran, if anyone I knew at boarding school, could see him.

"You keep on," Ma tells me. "Be determined. Not lazy, like you did with piano lessons. You don't understand, you try again."

Daddy points his finger. "That Xiao Lu, he's entering the Westinghouse competition. You know every year who wins?" No one answers. "Chinese," my father says triumphantly. All our lives we've been hearing about Xiao Lu. I wonder who his parents hold up to him as an example.

I ask my mother if Nai-nai is coming for Thanksgiving.

"No," Ma answers. "Her hip is bothering her. Your Nai-nai doesn't like turkey anyway. That Su-yi will cook a big fish."

Our own Thanksgiving dinner is fancier than usual. Ma actually buys fresh cranberries and simmers them with orange peel and honey. I have two helpings of everything, including the pumpkin pie home-baked by our new neighbor, Lally Escobar. Marty's acting friendlier now. After dinner we put on our down jackets and mittens and go for a walk up to East Rock, where she tells me about her new boyfriend. His name is Schuyler, he attends the private day school in town, he's fifteen and has his learner's permit. The cigarettes we're smoking were stolen from his older brother. "Dad can't stand him," Marty says. She takes a long drag and stares out into the dusk and then she says: "We're doing it."

To tell the truth I'm shocked. Drugs is one thing but sex is something else. Who would want to? We're sitting out of the wind, on a gigantic flat rock that's famous in the area as a glacial formation. I wrap my arms around myself, squashing the down until I hear it sigh. "What's it like?" I ask, trying to keep my voice normal.

"Mmmmhmmm," she says. Schuyler's parents are always away on cruises and safaris and he and his brother are left the run of the house, ostensibly under the care of the maid. Marty tells me about the parents' bedroom, the sheets with the giant chrysanthemums on them, how they always put on the Rolling Stones.

"Do you like it?" I ask.

"It's okay," she says, so offhand that I want to belt her. She's perched on the edge of the rock, her blue-jeaned legsa"grown long for her heighta"dangling over. The hood of her parka is thrown back and in the fading light her lashes cast half-moon shadows against her cheek as she contemplates the smoke from her cigarette. I picture her lying back naked on a giant four-poster bed, entwined with some silent clumsy boy.

It makes me so upset that I have to look away.

"I'm the only Oriental at school," I tell her. "Except this girl, Jane Chu, who's from New York Chinatown. She was born here but she talks with an accent."

"Kind of like Mimi." Mimi is our age, the youngest daughter of the family who owns the Sung Trading Company downtown.

"You could go away to school too, Mar. It's a lot of fun." It's almost dark now, but I can feel her watching me.

"No, I'm okay here. Besides, Ma wants me to stick around. Not that she says anything, but I can tell." Marty crunches her cigarette out and with a practiced motion flicks it over the barbed wire into Lake Whitney.

"How about him?"

"Oh, he's nothing. He just yells a lot. He can't do anything. I don't give a fuck about him." She turns directly to face me. "He's an old man now, can't you see? He can't hurt us anymore."

Since we were kids we've never talked about Monkey King, my sister and I, and even now I'm not sure that she remembers exactly what happened. I'm not sure what she's telling me. I look away from her again, because if I don't, I know I'm going to throw up my Thanksgiving dinner.

During Christmas vacation Marty makes herself scarce. Schuyler has turned sixteen and gotten his license. I meet him a couple of timesa"he's blond and beefy and taciturn, the prototype of all my sister's subsequent boyfriends. I notice once that my sister is wearing the gold scarf Ma refused to buy for her. Sometimes when she comes in late I hear Daddy yelling. "You are useless! Useless girl!" His voice grates, getting more and more high-pitched until I want to scream. Somehow, my sister manages to ignore him.

One evening Ma knocks on my door and says she needs help deciding what to wear to the faculty Christmas party. I lie on my stomach on her bed as she stands in front of her closet flipping through hangers. "You think I should wear dress or pants?"

"Pants. It's chicer." I'm flattered that she wants my opinion.

She pulls out a pair of black trousers, and after some consideration, a cherry-colored tunic, and puts them on while I watch from the bed. She catches my eye in the dresser mirror.

"You know, Sal-lee, you could be nicer to your daddy."

"How am I not nice to him?"

"You disappoint him. He try to be kind."

"He's always been crabby, Ma. It's not my fault."

Ma twists to examine her backside in the mirror. "Your father is not a cheerful man," she admits.

"Maybe he should help around the house once in a while instead of just sitting there reading his newspapers."

"I know Marty and Daddy don't get along, but you were always his favorite. Don't you remember?"