𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐎𝐟 𝐀 𝐌𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 (𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 1)

On Telling My Little Sister Her Friend is Dead When I began writing Calf, I didn’t tell anyone in my family what the novel was about. I was just “writing a novel” and I “didn’t want to talk about it while I was writing it.” I applied this dictum uniformly and after awhile people stopped asking. And because it took four years to write and almost twice as long to find a publisher, everyone began to forget about it. Amid the torrent of rejection that the novel was “too bleak” or “too dark for most people” and the dead-in-the-water period that followed its initial rounds, I began to think that the book would never be published. The reward for being unpublished was that I would never have to tell my family what my novel was about. When I finally got the call from my agent telling me we had an offer, the first feeling I felt was dread. I would have to tell my sister. One night in 1982, when I was eleven and three quarters years old, less than a week before I turned twelve, my parents went out for the evening. Me and my sister, then nine and three quarters years old, less than a month before she turned ten, were charged with baby-sitting our kindergarten brother, which we interpreted as making sure the TV was turned off and we were all in our rooms before we heard our parents return. Our much younger brother was supposed to go to bed much earlier than we were, but no parents around meant all bets were off, all bedtimes were stretched. That evening, I answered the phone fully expecting to recite the latch-key kid mantra of “my mother can’t come to the phone right now” drilled into us as a safety measure to thwart potential criminal strangers from marking us as vulnerable.