I was furious. Spelling shouldn’t matter! Didn’t they understand my genius?
Baggy band T-shirts couldn’t hide my tits, which started to come in when I was nine. Grown men began harassing me on the street. My family isn’t the kind that sees no intermediate steps between early puberty and teen motherhood, but the Hasidic men who offered me fifty bucks for a handjob didn’t much care. When I was fourteen and wandering through Brooklyn, a sixty-year-old Rodney Dangerfield look-alike asked me on a date. I declined. “No, a sex-type date,” he said. When I declined again, he told me I was ugly anyway.
A girl doesn’t so much realize she can attract men as notice she’s being watched. Her body, formerly her instrument, is now the reason she must be fetishized and confined.
I was less popular with my schoolmates than I was with the old men on the street. I was one of the only punk girls in my middle school. As I stomped into homeroom in my illicit anarchy T-shirts, classmates sniped, “Where’s the funeral?” Books kept me company. I made my own antiauthoritarian canon: Marquis de Sade, Lolita, Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide. I shoplifted these books using pockets I’d sewn into my coat for the purpose. The teachers didn’t like it when I read during lectures. They stuck me in in-school suspension: a day staring at the walls of a windowless room, no books allowed. With my brain unoccupied, minutes became their own sort of torture.
When I got home, I blared Trent Reznor till the bass drowned out my thoughts, and doubted I’d ever be done with childhood. My loyalties will always lie with the angry girl I was.
The guidance counselor emoted at me during meetings, her eyes moist with false concern. She asked me why I was so angry.
I was angry because I was twelve.
The right way for a white girl to be angry is to turn her anger inward. She should be a victim, like a patient in Reviving Ophelia, the late-nineties ode to broken girlhood. She should starve or cut or blow boys who treat her badly. A crusading shrink should scoop her up and return her to good grades, tasteful clothes, and happiness—heart and hymen intact.
Like many smart kids, I had age dysmorphia. In my head, I was ready for adventures. In the world, I couldn’t hang out alone at Starbucks. What the guidance counselor didn’t want to remember is that childhood is helplessness. Schools have a kind of power over their students that most American adults will never experience until they enter a hospital, an old age home, an institution, or a prison.
At the end of seventh grade, the school had slapped me with a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, and my mom sent me to live with mi padre. After a year of being forced to leave work in the middle of the day to take me home because of my art, or my clothes, or my lippy disposition, she’d understandably had enough.
Mi padre had moved to rural New Jersey. I did not adapt well. My stepmother saw me get off the school bus one day and described me as a little black smudge against the bucolic forest leaves.
I moved into a basement room lined with black vinyl, where I could hide out with the Emma Goldman biographies mi padre had bought me and have long phone calls with boys who sold weed. I enrolled in the local school, but I fit in there even worse than I had in Long Island. I was the only Jew—a fact that became clear when, in English class, the teacher dissected Fiddler on the Roof with the condescension of a Victorian anthropologist.
That year, I dispensed with my virginity, with the help of a high school senior. He was pale and scrawny, and he wore his curly black hair jaw-length, like Brandon Lee. He emphasized the resemblance by hanging the movie poster for The Crow over his bed. He and Brandon made eye contact as he came. Afterward, I walked alone around his suburban cul-de-sac. I felt sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or excitement. I was rid of what the world said was most precious about me. I didn’t miss it.
I didn’t see that senior again, or any other boys either. Instead, I lost myself in the town library, devouring biographies: Oscar Wilde. Josephine Baker. Lola Montez. I sat reading on a bridge over the train tracks. The trees were frail as bones. There was no graffiti, no empty liquor bottles, no signs of life. As the sun set, I walked home past brown fields and I thought about dying. Life was just a few seconds in the sunlight. We should consume it voraciously, and give back everything in us.
The year passed. My mother, in her kindness, took me back.
It was the first week of high school. I sat in the overlit cafeteria reading Nietzsche. I understood every tenth word, but just reading it made me feel superior.
A small girl sat down next to me. She wore a knit cloche, like those I’d seen in books about the 1920s. She had a plain pale face, bobbed hair, and mocking olive eyes nearly as large as her mouth.
“That book is bullshit,” she said, reaching for it. Her frail fingers made mine look ogreish in comparison.
“It is not! It’s about how the most intelligent people will triumph!”
“It’s the first thing an adolescent reads when they haven’t read any other philosophy but want to feel special.”
I started to object, but I actually hadn’t read much else.
The girl introduced herself as Nadya, with a blurred Russian accent. I repeated her name back.
“You’re mispronouncing,” she told me. I never would get it right.
The next day, Nadya sat at my table again. The day after, we walked home together. She was seventeen, but she looked far younger, and she stood only four foot ten. As we left the school, some Italian girls jeered that we were lesbians.
We didn’t listen. We had a whole world to build together.
A recent immigrant from Moscow, Nadya became my best friend. Alone in the hostile school, we clung to each other, imagining other identities, different worlds where we would win. We wanted to be writers and artists. We wanted to live in Europe, drinking wine all night and arguing ideas with cynicism and passion.
One lunch hour, she shoved an envelope into my hands. It was a manuscript for the novel she’d written: a love story between a mobster and a flapper that took them from Paris to Corsica to Stalin’s gulags. I read it fast, while sitting next to her.
“Come with me to this blue city, where the smoke will swallow up the stones,” one line read.
I recited her words aloud, ravished. I imagined Moscow, snow frosting Saint Basel’s domes. I’d have done anything to go there with Nadya.
We snuck into Manhattan to eat a single expensive blini at Anyway Café. We argued philosophy. We ate pomegranates and read poems. We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real lives could begin.
At the end of the year, Nadya graduated and moved back to Moscow.
No new friends came along to replace her. Every weekend, I snuck into the city. After getting off the train, I always paused at the bottom of Penn Station’s escalators and looked up at the crush of New York, the hustlers and newspaper vendors and taxis, the crowds shoving for space. I said a silent prayer. One day I’d live here on my own. I’d belong to this city. This city would belong to me.
When I passed the crustpunks panhandling on Saint Mark’s Place, I went sick with envy. Why couldn’t I be as brave as them? They had no adults watching over their lives. They were free.
Come Monday morning, I was back in high school. I couldn’t even stand to be in the cafeteria. Most days, I feigned illness during lunch hour, so I could lie in the nurse’s office, reading or writing in the sweet white quiet. It shattered only once, when a boy flopped on the cot next to me and whispered that he’d rape me.
I ignored him. Instead, I scribbled a novel, in imitation of Nadya. To block out the pain of missing her, I built myself into the girl I imagined her to be.
With Nadya gone, I went looking for my community online. I found it on Usenet, a series of text-based special-interest message groups that focused on everything from art to obscure video games to Anne Rice. On one favorite haunt, alt.gothic.fashion, weird kids taught each other to make coffin purses—and support
ed each other while they came out as gay.
It was the 1990s, and our apartment had a dial-up modem that knocked me offline when my mom picked up the phone. Bandwidth was expensive, so pictures were a rarity. But Usenet’s community was real, and it saved kids like me.
This early Internet was simpler than today’s. Because only nerds and freaks really knew about it, online was safe. The mass media were already starting to sensationalize its dangers, but it was my hideout from a world that saw little use for anything I had to give. Online, I was praised for my precocity. Offline, I was mocked as a pretentious little bitch. Online I could pretend to be what I wished I were: a few years older, a lot more confident.
Girls like me used the Web in all the ways our parents feared. We read anarchist manifestos and exchanged lurid porn with grown men. We ruined perfectly good bottles of vodka trying to make absinthe with recipes we learned on Gothic Martha Stewart. We learned about trolls—a phrase that then referred to charismatic assholes who brilliantly derailed message board conversations. We learned to troll ourselves.
On the old Internet, even the flame wars were word wars—fought with written insults, not with hacked photos of the target having sex, as they are now. Behind our chosen handles, we had neither age nor gender nor body. We could win on brains alone.
When I was fifteen, I met a girl named Lilith on an occult Usenet group. I charmed her there, as I charmed everyone online, but when we arranged to meet at the hot dog stand near Penn Station, I could see the disappointment in the downward arc of her lips. The words that flowed so easily from my fingers choked somewhere around my throat. I hated myself for being so young and so eager for her to like me. Why was I so damn uncool?
Lilith told me she was meeting friends, probably to get out of our awkward tête-à-tête. Not getting the hint, I tagged along.
We went to a goth bar. Dust sparkled in the sunlight, above velvet couches patched with tape. In a corner sat three older guys in black trench coats. One of them, named Anthony, drank a sticky herbal concoction he told me was chartreuse. He was twenty-two, an Italian guy from Queens with black hair, absinthe eyes, and a boyish, smirking mouth.
Anthony offered me a cigarette. I didn’t smoke, but I wanted him to like me, so I sucked on it, letting the smoke leak out of my mouth like I’d seen my heroines do in movies. Looking at him, I thought he knew everything, and I knew almost everything, and he might help me make up the difference.
They decided to go to Washington Square Park to buy weed. No one told me to leave, so I tagged along silently. Finding no dealers, we sat by the park’s empty fountain. It was spring, and a contortionist hustled money from the crowd of NYU students. Around him, pigeons puffed and fucked and vomited food into each other’s mouths. Anthony offered me another cigarette.
“Do you know a pigeon is really just a dove with a bad rap?” he said, then exhaled theatrically.
A few days later, Anthony picked me up in a flashy muscle car, with pinstriping down the side. It vroomed menacingly, the result of a dubiously legal cooling system he’d had installed to make it go faster. We drove circles around Long Island, making out at the stoplights.
“I hate your sunglasses,” I announced, then plucked them off his face and threw them into traffic. The next day, he wrote me an email saying I was insane. I was incredulous. Didn’t guys like carefully scripted crazy?
We drove out to Jones Beach. It was closed. We snuck in anyway. I shucked off my dress. We fumbled with his pants. The air was ice, and the wet sand stuck, and we froze till we couldn’t feel our lips kissing, but didn’t people always have sex on the beach in books?
That night, on miserable Long Island, I told him I loved him. He told me he loved me too.
Being in love suddenly gave me purpose. When I started seeing Anthony, the teachers who ratted me out to my mom no longer mattered. The Fs on my biology tests didn’t matter. All that mattered was Anthony. He saw me as a woman rather than a child. He gave me a new self to try.
In return, I adored him, in a way that had little to do with who he was.
Anthony was a depressive smart-ass. He’d graduated high school early with a chemistry scholarship, but he’d been thrown out of college for allegedly planning to blow up the campus church. “It was a rip-off of the Pantheon,” he told me. “But it didn’t have any hole at the top. Someone needed to add a skylight.”
After getting arrested, getting expelled twice, and running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt from going to raves and souping up his car, Anthony slunk back home and moved into his childhood bedroom. He worked nights at a tech job and slept most of the day. On Saturdays we drove all night, smoking weed and blaring the Cure, speeding from one end of Long Island to the other. I shimmied out of my dress and sat naked next to him. The white of the road dashed on the black. To us, those mall-clogged arteries felt like freedom.
After the first year, Anthony began to pick me up later and later, sometimes not bothering to show up at all. He never told me why.
On Saturdays, I leaned out the window, watching for his car.
Waiting for him to come, I started bargaining with myself. If three cars pass before he gets here, I promised, I’ll punch my arms raw. If five cars pass . . . Finally I gave up. I walked away from the window. To distract myself, I sat down and decided to draw a century-old fern my mom had taken from Sam Rothbort’s house. It was a complicated subject, the leaves curving trickily, ducking under each other. I obsessed over the edges, shading them, getting them wrong. I tore out the paper angrily. I tried again.
Turned outward, anger is restorative. If you can hang on to a pen, you can hang on to living, if just for that day.
Hours passed. I felt the edge smoothing, millimeter by millimeter. I stopped caring about Anthony, or about anything outside my sketchpad. All that mattered was how closely I could observe those leaves. I held my pencil up like a ruler. My angles were off. I redrew.
Then, finally, the buzzer rang. I threw down the sketchpad and smoothed my hair. I was back, a girl again, not an artist. My man was here. Everything would be fine.
I opened the door. He stood there in the hallway, with his smirk and his old trench coat, not even embarrassed to be four hours late. I stared at the curve of his lips and hated myself. If I were any good, he’d have shown up on time.
I kissed him like nothing had happened, then led him to my bedroom. My mom was out with friends, and the apartment was empty. After sex, we smoked, leaning out the window. The night air was cold on our faces. One of these days, he told me, he’d pay off his credit cards, finish college, and drive cross-country. He’d be like a chemist Hunter S. Thompson. I could be like Hunter S. Thompson’s girl. That was supposed to be good enough for me.
By senior year, paying attention in class was an impossibility. I aced my AP history exams without trying. But in subjects like math for which I had less aptitude, I handed in assignments filled with nothing but sketches of cats.
I applied to two New York City art schools and got into both. One of them was known for producing famous illustrators, but it was elite and pricey. The other, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), was blue-collar, and with no famous art graduates at all. My mother refused to let me take on any debt, knowing it would constrain my future. Resentfully, I signed up for FIT.
Despite my poor grades, I was able to double up on classes my senior year, skipping lunch to walk in lonely circles around the track to make up for a year’s worth of gym, thus earning enough credits to graduate six months early. I was seventeen, and ready to be someone—somewhere—else.
I decided I’d go to Paris. Every artist I loved had been educated there, and I hoped to win my place in their ranks. I knew, vaguely, that young women were not supposed to travel alone. But in the books I read, they did. And what did the rules of suburban Long Island matter next to the books I worshipped? I’d inherited a thousand bucks from mi abuelito that was meant to pay for college, and mi padre was willing to pay his child support dire
ctly to me. I had just enough money for a student-rate plane ticket and the most pinched of accommodations. I bought my ticket from a student travel agency in Manhattan, then using the horrific French I’d learned from kids’ books, I called up a twenty-dollar-a-night hotel in Paris and booked a room.
Then I told my mother. Afraid I’d get killed in some strange city, she tried desperately to talk me out of it. I didn’t listen; I never did.
Instead of a yearbook, I had my classmates sign a thrift-store copy of Death in Venice. I’d always felt excluded during high school. But high on their own nostalgia, my classmates left such kind notes that when I showed the book to a friend years later, he told me I’d probably been excluding them.
Before I left, I gathered every childhood photo of myself I could find. Without looking, I burned them all. They were baggage I didn’t need. I was going far, and I wanted to travel light.
Anthony drove me to the airport. We sat next to each other, mostly in silence, passing the malls and mosques that lined the roads to JFK. Long Island fell away behind me, and with it Anthony too. When we got to the departure gate, I was too scared to leave. He shoved me toward the gate. “I love you, and there’s a piece of me that’s always there with you,” he said with a pained half smile.
I buried my head on his shoulder, then turned and walked away, toward security.
The streets of Paris were as familiar as a dream. The city smelled of dog shit and cherry blossoms. Its baroque buildings shimmered the same color as the Seine.
The room I booked was at the Hôtel Saint-Jacques, up eight twisting flights of stairs. The shower was down the hall. On weekends I wandered through the bird market on the Île de la Cité, scribbling the squawking canaries, then walked for hours through Les Halles and Pigalle, past sex stores and three-card monte games and bakeries luscious with pastries I couldn’t afford. I read books at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Paris was not the postcard cliché I’d read about. It was something better: a raw metropolis, both New York’s opposite and its equal.
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