When I'm seventeen and in high demand, it's a rare night when I have nothing planned or hopeful happening. I've left home, I'm preparing for school on a scholarship, and the taciturn and vague guidance given me by my father's nanny, with whom I live in a small two-bedroom apartment near school, is just like running wild. I won't miss her when I'm ( Read more... )

When I am sixteen, Robbie and I drive to pick up his cousin from middle school. She's fun, but a bit of a drag. She loves the most depressing, overwrought music, and dresses like a clown's funeral, and the friends she brings along are monsters, all staring eyes and desperate attempts at wit. But we love her; and it's the last day of school. I can ( Read more... )

When I am thirteen, I take up the flute. Inspired by my younger brother, who watched the children bicycling past from his second-floor window for a good week before pronouncing himself "ready" -- and taking to his wheels the first second in practice, like a fish in water -- I have decided that knowing music is possible, and having genetic proof ( Read more... )

When I am twelve, at the end of my year, I have conquered many of the groups I set out to conquer. The freak-adjacent girls with their lipgloss and soccer-player boyfriends, that love INXS and love me for my weirdness and homosexuality, are such an unexpected boon that I will remember their names and several of their outfits twenty years later.

One ( Read more... )

When I am twelve I am presented with a choice: Side with the nerds, or side with the freaks. Not a choice that has ever been ignored by entertainment or media, but very real and very much essential when I am twelve.

The nerd boys are my brothers: Comic books, role-playing games, science fiction, puzzles, theoretics. They are as blameless and ( Read more... )

I am perturbed. When I am eight, my body begins to act on its own inclination, without my conscious permission. I think of my penis rarely, but if given any thought I would describe him perhaps as a curious mute friend, or a friendly helper: Like the animals in a fairytale, or the talkative props in the hardback Value Tales I enjoy so much, in ( Read more... )

When I am eleven, my mother is in the hospital, and I live with my father. It's an experiment we try every few years that invariably falls to ruin because of my distasteful relationship with my stepmother. When I am twenty-five I understand that this dangerous conflict is born not of difference but of similarity; when I am eleven neither of us ( Read more... )

The memory of my busker Toby remains sweet, and is still with me when I am ten, and demanding a flute. Mother does not commit to the instrument in question, but agrees that I deserve music. The music store is bewildering, and there is no talk of music. When my father takes me to the music shop, it's a country-store porch: Men, long-haired and short ( Read more... )

When I am ten, all I can think about is when I turn twelve. I have set this goal for myself and spend all my time thinking about it: When I am twelve. Not quite a teenager, which comes with such a heavy burden of expectations and assumed upheaval that it seems at most like a raw deal, but twelve! Twelve, a perfect number. I've long thought about ( Read more... )

CHAPTER ONE: HOUSEKEY

When I am six my mother takes me to a parade for a holiday I'm not sure we even have anymore. There are fifteen people in the brass band and ten acrobats. In the bystanders I spot seven dogs -- four large, three small -- and at least three people with snakes draped across their shoulders. They are horrifying, these last, but ( Read more... )