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time during this year and attends the junior high school on South Jennings Avenue in Fort Worth, where she is the only girl in her woodworking class.
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    1934–38. Pat is retrieved from Texas by Mary and Stanley in 1934 and taken back to New York, where the Highsmith family has moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and is living at One Bank Street. Pat attends the all-girl, eight-thousand-pupil Julia Richman High School on East Sixty-seventh Street where she falls in love with various classmates and befriends Judy Tuvim (Judy Holliday).
    Like Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Catholic, half-Jewish mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, and like New York City itself, the majority of the Julia Richman High School population is unevenly divided between Catholics and Jews. Pat’s memories of high school are resentful: “There are never enough Protestants to throw a party.” She begins making the rounds of Greenwich Village bars and cafés: her favorite is the Jumble Shop on MacDougal Street. She starts to take notes on her surroundings and relations; she transcribes these early notes in her Cahier 9.
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    1935. Pat begins her first story. It is lost, but in 1968 she still remembers the first sentence: “He prepared to go to sleep, removed his shoes and set them parallel, toe outward, beside his bed.” This sentence gave her, she says, “a sense of order, seeing the shoes neatly beside the bed in my imagination.”
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    1937. June: Pat writes her second story, “Crime Begins,” done, she said, because she was tempted to steal a book from the Julia Richman High School library, but instead wrote a story about a girl who steals a book. “Crime Begins” and another story, “Primroses Are Pink,” are published separately in the Bluebird, the Julia Richman High School literary magazine.
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    1938. Pat begins her first official cahier with these words: “A lazy phantom-white figure of a girl dancing to a Tschaikowski waltz.”
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    1938–42. Pat attends Barnard College, where she serves on the editorial board of the school’s literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly, and enters the Barnard Greek Games as a “hurdle-jumper.” She studies zoology, English, playwriting, Latin, Greek, German, and logic (in which she receives a D grade) and earns a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. At Barnard she meets Kate Kingsley (later Skattebol), who becomes her lifelong friend and correspondent. Pat joins the Young Communist League, but not for long. During her college years, much of Pat’s social life is conducted outside school: she goes to parties at the Commerce Street studio of the photographer Berenice Abbott, meets the wealthy painter Buffie Johnson and the “eyes and ears” of the Luce organization, the English journalist Rosalind Constable. Buffie Johnson, Rosalind Constable, and Constable’s lover, the painter and gallerist Betty Parsons, introduce Pat to many well-placed people in New York.
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    1939. The Highsmiths move briefly from One Bank Street to 35 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village.
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    1940. The Highsmiths move to 48 Grove Street, a street of piano bars and historically revolutionary residents. They live directly across the street from the Federal mansion in which John Wilkes Booth is said to have plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
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    1940. Pat starts her first diary, “containing the body.”
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    1941. September: Pat writes “The Heroine,” rejected everywhere—even by her own college literary magazine, the Barnard Quarterly. The story will make its debut in the August 1945 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and is reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume of 1946. In the spring of 1941, the Barnard Quarterly publishes “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” a story about a boy raised as a girl in a convent of nuns (Pat gives the boy her own first name,