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when her dad’s building business started mushrooming and her mom arrived one day to pick her up from school in a huge, sparkling Escalade, we stayed friends. We took the Willing entrance tests together, joked about burning our Sacred Heart uniforms in the courtyard trash can.
    Then, the July before freshman year, Annamaria disappeared. It turned out she was in Loveladies, at the Jersey Shore, in her new five-bedroom beach-block house, two streets down from the Alsteads’ eight-bedroom beachfront house. In September, it was Anna Lombardi who arrived at Willing, tan and skinny, paying the full tuition, and dealing in gossip.
    I suspect it was Anna who brought “Freddy” to Willing. Of course, I can’t prove it, and I’ll never ask, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. In a school where almost everyone has lots of money, gossip is killer currency. Anna shucked South Philly and her past as easily as her Sacred Heart plaid skirt. And burned it all, like bridges, without a single backward glance.
    She didn’t look back—none of them did—as they walked away, Amanda twining herself around Alex and her flunkies following behind. Why would they look? There was nothing to see.

7
    THE HISTORY
    From
Incomplete: The Life and Art of Edward Willing
, by Ash Anderson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983:
    Â 
    September 7
    Hotel Ritz
    Paris
    Â 
    Dearest Spring (12) ,
    What biblical plagues shall I bring upon myself should I begin a letter cursing my parents? Shall we have cockroaches in our basement? Hurricanes lifting the tiles from our roof in August? Water that runs rusty-red from our pipes? But wait, we have those things already! You should well know, having picked beetle legs from your brushes. Aunt Edie, of course, beetles her brow and says nothing. (13) O Philadelphia, what domestic adversities lie beneath your stately edifices.
    So, to hell with them, my love.
    I am entirely serious. Why should you care that my parents think you beneath me? (14) We know better, you and I. We know that you are to me as champagne to beer—superior in every way. Yes, I know your soft heart would like all to be flowers and frolicking kittens, but my nature is such that I will think of the wasps and fleas. How perfect a pair we are, beloved Train, (15) completely unlike in such complementary ways.
    So my father loathes your lack of fortune? How fortunate that generations of unhappy intermarriage have given my family more money than can possibly be good for it. There is irony, too, in my mother scorning your lack of domestic skills when she has not so much as arranged a flower in twenty years. There is a housekeeper, a maid, a poor relation or two to do everything for her, including, I would imagine, pore through a Roget’s to find adequate words to express her disapproval. There are not words enough in heaven and earth to express my devotion.
    Shall I try a few, darling Post? (16) Immeasurable, mythic, dizzying? Boundless, fierce, orange? Passionate? Occasionally quite painful?
    I wake every morning, wishing you were beside me. I then pass the better part of the morning wishing you wished you were beside me when I awake. Yes, yes, I know, and I would beg your pardon if I felt any less impatient. December is far too far away.
    My love, My Love, is eternally yours.
    Edward
    Â 
    (From the private Willing Archive, courtesy of the Sheridan-Brown Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia. Reprinted with permission.)
    Â 
    Notes
    Chapter 11 (cont.)
    (12) In his early letters to Diana, Edward addresses her by a variety of names, including “Spring,” “Penelope,” and “Cab.” There is no documented explanation or key, and most suggestions, including that in which the names were derived from newspaper stories of the day (Hearst, 1946), have been debunked. In her letters, both before and during their marriage, Diana most often addresses Edward as “Darling Clod.”
    (13)