She giggled and smacked him, and he winked at me, the forced conspirator, who was nearly certain, but not entirely positive, that she understood. They treated me as someone who already had life experience. On the other hand, they seemed eager to be my life experience. They never failed to remind me that I could call them at any time of day or night. If I needed them, if anything bad was happening to me, if I was in trouble, if my parents were hurting me, they were the people I should call. When weeks and months passed and I still hadn’t called, their concern grew and their attention to me was amped so high, the other kids complained and I began feeling obligated to give them what they wanted. I was furious that my parents didn’t pull out my hair or toss me from windows. How else would I be pushed to call on my volunteer saviors and have them rescue me like they wanted when no one was threatening me with harm?

A few months into the fall, Ian called me at home. He wanted to see how I was doing. I was doing fine. He detected an edge in my voice. No edge, I told him. I didn’t have to pretend with him; I shouldn’t feel the need to hide. Okay, I said, adding nothing. Whatever it is, I can handle it. Whatever is happening to you, I can help you. I’ve been there before. What do you mean? I asked. My parents, they hurt me too. What do you mean? I asked. I mean, you’re not alone, runt, he said. (I was hurt by the term “runt” but tried not to spiral into an unhinged insecurity by reminding myself of Wilbur, the lovable pig in Charlotte’s Web—also a runt!) I know your pain. I see what’s happening to you. You do? I asked. I do, he said. I wanted him to tell me what he saw, because I needed material in order to have something to tell him. His calls became frequent and so did his questions. He even started coming over. Whenever I mentioned a guy, he’d ask me if I’d slept with him.

“Howard Jones?” I’d asked, incredulous. “I wish.”

No matter how many times I responded no, I hadn’t slept with him or him or him, or anyone for that matter, he continued to ask me. I either did not get it, or didn’t want to get it. A journal entry from that time validates both assumptions:

Ian came over yesterday. He’s so weird. He’s always asking if I’ve had sex with this person, this person, etc. I just wanna scream in his ear, Ian, you fuck

—

I’m a VIRGIN! That would shut him up for about five minutes

.

Ian wanted something from me I could not name and I wanted something from him that I could: a father. That’s all I wanted. I had always been drawn to older men. Since I was mini, I’d tried co-opting every grown man I came into contact with: our poor carpenter, a random babysitter, a few camp counselors, and, most recently, the acting teacher. In turn, the attention they paid me was driven by their needs, which were in opposition to mine, but that never prevented me from slipping under the open wing of a spare man. It took only a few months before I was rolled up in Ian’s.

I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I liked that he wanted anything at all, and people pleaser that I am, I was determined to give it to him, which meant becoming the person he assumed I was. Were I to fail, hit a false note, reveal myself as anything other than the dark, intense, fucked-up girl he was coaxing out of me, then I’d be the wrong type of girl for him and he wouldn’t want a thing from me at all. While I did have dark and intense feelings and struggled with real emotional issues, including an unfeminine reserve of anger, Ian was tugging at a part of me that already existed, but probably never would have developed had I not met him. And in his presence, I played the part of the brooding female James Dean, saying all the troubled things I knew he wanted me to say, as a dizzy-hot spray swept over every lie I told. I was in over my head and I did not know how to extract myself. I had no self yet, I was too young, so while I knew I wasn’t being me, I didn’t know how the person who was me acted. I simply knew she wasn’t this way. But I could not release Ian into the world so that he could find another fourteen-year-old girl to dote on. I did not want his focus on me to disappear, and I knew it would if I disappointed him by not being the fucked-up mess he desperately wanted to save. And that is when my lessons in acting truly began.

The truth is, I was fucked up. Genuinely and authentically troubled, but had I been given a bit more time to articulate the mess inside, I’m fairly certain I would have expressed it differently.

Without having someone for whom I was curating my inner life, I feel I would have found a more positive and productive way of expressing myself. My parents didn’t abuse me and yet I felt abused. I wasn’t adopted and yet I felt adopted. I knew I existed and yet I didn’t feel seen, and now someone not only saw me, but wanted to be my hero, and I had always wanted a hero. I had longed for such a thing my entire life and here he was, a handsome man nearing thirty waiting for someone like me to save.

One night after class, Caroline and Ian invited me upstairs to their apartment. It smelled like Irish Spring and toast. They offered me a soda, told me to relax on the couch, and then Ian pulled out a bag of pot and looked at me.

“I told you I’d come through for you,” he said, handing it to Caroline, who began to roll a joint. I panicked, looked at the clock, and pretended I had to get home.

“Like anyone will even notice you’re not home,” Ian said.

Right. Right. That. I had forgotten that my home life was one of utter neglect. That I could be gone for days and no one would notice. I had not kept track of every lie, of the labored-over poems and fake diary entries I left in places he could conveniently find. I had designed an entire mise-en-scène that wasn’t physically true in any apparent way. I had covered the gaping hole of truth with falsehoods and now I was falling through one.

I was trapped. Caroline lit the joint, and when she was done, passed it to Ian, and after he was done, he handed it to me. I took the joint and the requisite drag, but coughed hard on the exhale sending ripples of laughter through them, which sent a fire of fear up my entire being. Had I fucked it all up? I handed it back to Caroline and then motioned to the clock and the door again.

“Oh, please, you can smoke a little more,” Ian said, handing the joint back to me. I had no choice; I had to smoke more pot. After another hit, a sweat-inducing nausea began to rise, alerting me that something ominous was about to happen. Then I felt it, a tickle in my throat, which I tonsiled back, trying hard to trap it, but it couldn’t be squelched. Nothing was more embarrassing than allowing my actual truth to escape in front of these people. A cough, or god forbid a sneeze, anything suggesting bodily susceptibility, had to be blocked at the pass. Perhaps because I was playing a part and concealing my human self, I began to feel not human, as though I was as biologically different from my body as my persona was to my reality. I had such control over my performance, my nuanced expressions, and body language that a natural function, such as a cough, threatened to topple the entire empire. The only way to get beyond the moment was to move past the cough, and the only way to move past the cough was to cough, which I did, seemingly without end.

My hope was that the cough would scratch the tickle and send it away, but it did no such thing. If anything it seemed to thicken it, morph the tickle into an object, something lodged, like a bone or a seed had wedged itself into one of my tonsils. This something was not sliding down, would not pass, and through the coughing, my fear escalated that I was going to vomit, choke on my vomit, and die. The last thing I wanted to do was die in front of the two people I was trying to impress. Was I allergic to pot? Had smoking brought this on? Was coughing like this a secret symptom of someone who had never smoked pot before? Were they on to me now because I was unwittingly giving away my secret? I could not stop coughing. I was dying. I was doing the most embarrassing thing a human could do. Dying was a secret you tried to keep. At fourteen you don’t know enough about life to understand that dying is as ugly as living. I had presented myself to them as invincible and if I actually died now, they’d know that I’d been lying. I didn’t want to disappoint them, even after I was dead!