Exerpts

Me, Before

I can’t tell you what all thirteen-year-old girls are like, but I can tell you what I was like. Of course, this was all before.

I was in the eighth grade, and for the first time I was really obsessed with my appearance, my status, with fitting in. This is understandable, if you consider that I was growing up in America, and in New Canaan, Connecticut. New Canaan is the richest town in the richest state in the country. The moms all drive Suburbans and the dads all take the train to the city. And by the time they are ten years old, the kids in New Canaan know that the highest-grade BMW is not as nice as the best Mercedes. They know that you should never be seen cutting your own lawn, and that embossed stationery is far superior to lithographed.

- UK Cover On the surface, everyone and everything in New Canaan is tasteful. We don’t have any fast-food restaurants or neon signs because the town doesn’t allow them. The houses are all the same—colonial, wood siding (never vinyl), two stories. In general people are friendly and pleasant, and it seems like the most serious thing that ever happens in New Canaan is the cancellation of a ladies’ tennis match.

I have a love-hate relationship with the town of New Canaan. I love it because it is beautiful. The best of everything is available, from chocolate to people, but after everything that happened to me when I was thirteen I began to think a little differently about what the place had taught me about myself and about life.

The first thing you notice about the people in my town is that almost all of them are good-looking. In fact, being pretty is so common in New Canaan that the only people who stand out, the ones other people point at and talk about, are the average-looking ones.

Since I was very little, I have been confused about what beauty is and what it means. At thirteen I accepted the image of beauty I saw on the covers of fashion magazines. I thought the Calvin Klein models inside were beautiful. I thought ultra-thinness was beautiful. Beauty was painful. And it was very expensive.

I am sure that I started thinking this way when I was thirteen, because that was the first year I noticed that most of the really bright and successful people I met also happened to be beautiful. I wondered which came first, the beauty or the success. Perhaps their looks accelerated their success, or because they were successful they had the money to invest in their appearance. No matter what the cause, you can see that beauty equals success right on TV. And I don’t just mean actors. Even the people who do the news on TV are attractive. Think of Diane Sawyer or Stone Phillips.

In New Canaan, there were plenty of beautiful rich people walking the streets as living examples of success. It seemed like all the women were blonde and slim with perfect skin and perfect hair. Their children were pretty, too, and a lot of effort went into making sure of this. I was always surprised when I met a kid with a less-than-perfect smile who didn’t have braces. Everyone in New Canaan had to have impeccable teeth to go with their perfect hair and unblemished skin.

I managed to meet the size-ten weight limit, but I knew I fell short of most of New Canaan’s beauty standards. In an effort to catch up, I read every single beauty magazine I could get my hands on, certain that inside lay the secrets to a successful, happy life. I would buy at least five magazines each month, usually Marie Claire, Mademoiselle, Allure, Self, and Glamour. After reading these I would then trade them to my friends in exchange for magazines I hadn’t purchased. This way, I could read the whole magazine rack. Though a casual observer may think these magazines are alike, they are not. One might have one hundred suggestions on how to do your hair or how to pluck your eyebrows for proper shaping and contour. Another would offer reviews of the best tanning products. I felt like I needed every scrap of beauty information available, and I worried enough about missing something important that no magazine page was left unturned.

There was a problem with the magazines, however. Some of the articles gave conflicting information, which led to confusion. As Glamour encouraged me to wear makeup, Mademoiselle told me that most of it is made with whale blubber, a little fact that made me sick.

Then there was the problem of my own inner standards. Despite all of the influences around me, I also believed that for a person to be beautiful, she had to be naturally beautiful. The glow had to come from within, not out of a bottle. The trouble was, deep down, I knew I didn’t possess natural beauty, and if makeup was cheating, then I was doomed to be ugly. And because of this, I was going to have limited choices in life. Now that I am a few years older, I know I am not ugly. But back there in the land of thirteen, I could see that I wasn’t the airbrushed Calvin Klein ad. I wasn’t even close. And since that was beauty, I was the opposite.

Being afraid that I was not beautiful didn’t prevent me from putting a lot of time and energy into my looks. I wouldn’t leave the house unless my hair was blown-dry to make it perfectly straight. This took time, and since I sang in a select chorus at school—rehearsals were at 6:45 a.m.—I had to get up before dawn to do my hair. The teacher’s rule was if you’re late, then screw you; the door will be locked and you’ll surely hear about it later. I was never late.

Because I wasn’t the most quiet person when I woke up, I usually made noise just walking the few feet from my room to the bathroom. I don’t know how I did it. My mother claimed I slammed the doors, but I believe these were hyperbolic statements. (When I was thirteen, hyperbolic was one of my favorite words, and it seemed like everybody was a little hyperbolic.)

I thought spending large amounts of time in the bathroom was frivolous. I didn’t take long in the shower, and I never spent time looking at my body because I didn’t like it. I kept a towel around me until I entered the water, avoiding the mirror at all costs. If this meant standing under the shower with cold water on my head for a few seconds until it got warmer, then fine. I got in there, did what I had to do, and left. I did everything to conserve time. I brushed my teeth in the shower, a trick I saw in a movie once. And if I had to shave I did it very quickly, taking a razor and running it up and down my legs. I didn’t use any of those prissy shaving gels. Altogether, I spent only about a minute and a half in the shower, but believe it or not it took me a long time to learn how to tie my hair up in a towel after showering. I am still not sure if I do it right, but the way I do it works. I love my hair; I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It is blonde and straight, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

After I showered I inspected my face for blemishes. I learned in Marie Claire that the best time to pop zits is right after a shower. This is because the steam from the shower opens your pores so the pus drains easier. I couldn’t stand to leave zits on my face. I never had a lot of them, though the occasional few did come along and needed proper attention. If I didn’t take care of them, my mom was sure to say something, which was a lot more painful than any squeezing could ever be.

As I was finishing up in the mirror I’d turn on the radio and then the hair dryer. I’d think about my outfit and sing along.

I love music, almost all types. When I was little, we rode in the car singing songs by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Buddy Holly, the Temptations, and my mom’s favorite, Rod Stewart. I know all the words.

I also like some new songs. I can beat anyone at name-that-tune, even if you include opera and classical. Unfortunately I don’t carry a tune very well. My mom says she would rather listen to a dying duck. My voice is really that bad. The only reason I got into all-state and the select choir was be cause I play the piano for some of the songs, so I’m not completely useless.

I didn’t dry my hair in front of the mirror because, like I said, I hated mirrors. I didn’t put on hair spray or any styling products because I didn’t want to take the risk of damaging my hair. I always wore it down, parted in the middle, cut on an angle so I’d have small wisps that hung in my face. This gave me the opportunity to play with it during the day.

I know you may be bored hearing so much about my hair, but this is what matters when you are thirteen. Besides, my hair was the only part of my body that I liked. I trimmed it every seven weeks at a salon to ensure healthy ends. I tried hard to never have a bad hair day. If I didn’t have time to blow-dry it straight, then I didn’t wash it. Going out with wavy hair would have been too embarrassing.

Once I finished with my hair I got dressed. If you were ever an eighth-grade girl, then you’d understand how much I focused on what people wear every day. I have always liked clothes, but at thirteen I was absolutely obsessed with them. Without telling anyone, I tried to set a record for wearing a different outfit every single day. I really don’t think I actually made it through the whole year, but I wanted to go as long as possible. At the start of the year I planned out my clothes so I could go at least four months, maybe four and a half. I figured at that point my parents would take me shopping, and I was right.

I had two rules about making my outfits. One involved shoes. Even though they do make the outfit, an outfit wasn’t a “different” outfit just because I wore different shoes.

Number two: I wouldn’t resort to wearing anyone else’s clothes, or wearing something that was very old. Even if I had never worn it. I had a teddy bear vest that I had never worn. Even so, it was old, so it was against my rules to use it to make a new outfit.

I guess you could say my style was perfect for a middle-schooler living in Martha Stewart country. It was all J. Crew and Gap. Khakis, oxford shirts, polo shirts, sweaters tied around the neck. Solid colors only, no prints. Nothing else really passed—except for pleated skirts and argyle kneesocks. Most of my friends shared the same taste. We didn’t wear hose. But we did wear jeans. I usually wore Gap special- edition jeans. My mother didn’t understand that they were worth the extra ten dollars, but they were, because they came a little more washed and faded.

Everyone I knew was just as obsessed. Two of my classmates—Sandra and Erin—planned their outfits weeks in advance. They even created an exchange system for rotating their entire wardrobes.

Eighth grade was also the first year girls started to wear skirts and dresses to school. The girl next to me in social studies class always wore skirts when she was trying to get the attention of some guy. It was pathetic. I usually wore them only on gym days. That way I could slip my gym shorts on underneath and nobody had to see me in my underwear.

Which reminds me, I hated my legs then, just as much as I do now. At thirteen I already had the biggest thighs in the world. They were so huge that my mom wouldn’t even buy me a skirt that was above the knee.

My whole morning routine took until 6:25. This was when I went into my mother’s room and kissed her good-bye. It was usually the only time in the day when I saw her. Ever since my father left our family—I was a baby at the time—my mother has worked full-time. But when I was around eleven or twelve she really became a workaholic. Most of the time she got home so late I didn’t even see her before I went to bed. She really lived at work, or for her work. Even if she was home, she was always thinking about work.

After I kissed my mom I went downstairs to look for my stepfather, David, who drove me to school. By the time I was thirteen, David and my mother rarely ever slept in the same bed anymore. David snored too much, so he slept in the guest room. David and my mother never took vacations alone as a couple, ever. And they argued like there was no tomor row. Despite all of this, in some strange way that I can’t figure out, they loved each other.

Like my mother, David was pretty much a workaholic. But even though he had a long commute to the city, he drove me to school early every morning so I could make chorus practice.

I didn’t much like talking to David, so these car rides consisted of me changing the radio as much as possible. I couldn’t stand to listen to bad songs, so station surfing was very big with me. Occasionally David said, “Can’t you just leave it alone, Katie?” It was just a five-minute ride to school but I didn’t stop pressing the buttons until I found something I liked.

Like most schools, I guess, mine was often frustrating and I felt misunderstood a lot of the time. The most alienating part of school is the way they separate you into groups, as if to say, “This girl will be a success, but this one won’t.” Like most kids, I never got into the program for gifted students, and it bothered me. We all knew what it meant.

Fortunately, there was one teacher I felt close to—the choral director, Ms. Montarro. She loved students who co- operated with early-morning call, and I did. Our group was called the Choraleers. Twenty-five kids from the seventh and eighth grades met three or four mornings a week. We mostly sang cheesy stuff, but we were pretty good. We sang the National Anthem at Mets games, and we sang at the all-state convention and for Congress.

In school, I was probably most devoted to music. Outside school, it was swimming. In fact, by the eighth grade swimming had become the major focus of my life, and as a result the New Canaan swim team—a highly competitive, nationally known club—was a big part of our family’s life. My mother was very friendly with the coach and the other parents. And my younger sister, Carrie, had started swimming, too.

I first got involved with swimming when I was a preschooler and went for lessons at the YMCA. Their system started kids out as “guppies” who wore water wings and splashed around the pool with their mothers. (I went with my nanny.) Swimming was an important safety thing in our family and my mother insisted we work through minnow, fish, flying fish, to the shark level, which was the highest, so we would all be able to handle ourselves in the water.

By the third grade I had noticed the swim team, which also worked out at the Y, and started to think that I might like to try it. Unlike other sports, which require a lot of hand-eye coordination—more than I possess—swimming is a matter of practice and commitment, two things I could manage. When I told my parents that I was interested in joining the team, they were excited that I wanted to participate in any kind of sport.

I began competing in the fourth grade, which meant I also started practicing many hours a week. The main feeling I had at those early practices was coldness. Swimmers move fastest through cold water, so the pool at the Y was always chilly. I was usually one of the last ones in, and I never got used to the cold.

The team competed mainly in regional meets, but every year we qualified for some national tournaments as well. I suppose it was exciting to travel to different meets, but the most I ever saw of any of the cities we visited would be the hotel, the pool, the airport, and, if I was lucky, a restaurant. It didn’t really matter if I was in California or Florida, it all seemed the same to me.

I invested a lot of time and effort in swimming, so much that it became a big part of my identity. My parents got hooked into the swim team, too. At the pool there were always two competitions. The first was the actual swim meet. Even though we all wore swim caps and bathing suits, everyone knew each other, or at least the competition. I know I would sit there and inspect the muscles of each swimmer, how defined they were and well trained they looked. You couldn’t hide any of it in a swim suit, and I had a pretty good idea about who was a serious competitor even before we got into the water.

While the swimmers competed on the pool deck and in the water, upstairs in the bleachers the parents were competing, too. They kept track of who was swimming when and what times were needed to be able to finish where. The parents were always talking with each other, trying to figure out who had done what. They wanted to know how much extra help a particular swimmer might be getting. Who had private lessons? Who had a fitness coach?

I always felt like my self-worth was determined by how well I placed. And I think the parents felt the same way—their status among the team parents depended on how well their child placed.

As I improved, I became one of the swimmers that the coaches depended on for winning times. Where once it was enough to be in the top ten, gradually I was pressured to be in the top five, four, three. All the emphasis on winning made swimming less and less enjoyable. During those moments when I had doubts about staying with the team, all the work put into swimming convinced me to continue. I shoved my doubts away and thought, If I don’t swim, what will I do? I’ll have no life.

When you consider the demands of swimming, choir, and school, it’s obvious I didn’t have a whole lot of time for friends. In fact, I had just one close friend, a girl named Karen. As far as I could tell, Karen had a perfect life. She was tall and thin. She had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. She was a soccer player, and her team had won a regional championship. She was also very intelligent.

Karen lived in a two-million-dollar house. It wasn’t as gorgeous as the house next to it, which was on the front of Unique Homes, but I would have traded it for our house in a second. It had so many bedrooms that her older sister was allowed to have two. The whole place was decorated like a shrine to a happy family. The walls were covered with pictures of vacations, soccer games, and holidays. I always wanted my mom to put up pictures of our family, but she said she didn’t have time.

Karen’s family was sort of like the Kennedys, without the politics. They were all smart, all excellent athletes. Her brother Rob attended Williams College. Her father was in the real estate development field, and her mother was a full-time homemaker. Every time I went to Karen’s house, her mother was cooking something like chicken or pasta. And she would do anything for us, even run out and get a last-minute video. And I will never forget the hot fudge she made for special occasions like Karen’s birthday.

It’s funny; I didn’t like Karen in elementary school. She was a tomboy back then. She even admitted to me that she wore boxers in fifth grade. But by middle school she was in most of my classes and it didn’t take long for me to see that she was no longer a tomboy. In fact, Karen had a way with guys, and all I could think was that she had somehow learned it during her tomboy phase.

I couldn’t approach guys the way Karen did. I didn’t have her confidence. I knew I was not beautiful the way she was, but I also couldn’t see what she saw in guys our age. The clichÈ about girls being more mature than boys is true. Just listen to boys talk. It’s always about skateboarding or something they saw on TV. Girls talk about relationships and the future. Serious things.

I also didn’t understand the idea of dating at our age. I mean, I thought a date was where a guy picks a girl up at her house and takes her out. How can that happen in middle school? No one has a driver’s license or the money for going out to eat or to a movie.

Nevertheless, girls my age put a great deal of effort into somehow connecting with boys in a romantic and sexual way. I almost fell out of my chair in social studies class one day when I heard that a girl named Jenny had given a blow job to a boy named Adam at a local park. At first I refused to believe it. But I heard it from a reliable source, and Jenny was one of the short-skirt girls in our class. A month later she was reportedly actually having sex with another boy. I heard her talking about how she had used an orange-colored condom and how it felt to lose her virginity. I was so grossed out.

It wasn’t just Jenny who was running the bases sexually. Rumors flew around school about who fingered who, and what guy managed to get his hand up which girl’s shirt.

At parties we would play a game called Never Have I Ever. We would sit around in a circle with some type of alcohol or beverage. Someone would then say, “Never have I ever kissed someone,” and everyone who had kissed some one would have to take a sip. This game made everyone’s experience level in the sex department—or at least what they confessed to—common knowledge.

My experience was nil, and I couldn’t decide whether this was embarrassing or not. One spring afternoon I was sitting outside on a concrete bench waiting for a ride home from school. It was late, so there was only one other girl waiting with me. I had never talked to her before, but I knew who she was. She always wore black tops—long sleeve, short sleeve, halter—always black.

It wasn’t long before she asked me if I had a boyfriend. I wasn’t even wearing a bra yet, and this girl wanted to know if I had a boyfriend.

“Are you kidding me?” I laughed. “We are much, much too young to be dating.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she said sarcastically. “We’re not too young. Everybody’s doing it. That’s the way it is.”

And with that, she turned away. I felt stupid because there was obviously something going on that I didn’t know about. Luckily my ride arrived and I didn’t have to sit there with her any longer.

When you are thirteen, you spend most of your time trying to figure out whether you’re a kid or a teenager or an adult, when you are really part of each. You feel like people are constantly judging you for the most superficial reasons. No one my age seemed to be interested in music, or books, or any of the things that mattered to me. They cared more about who had big boobs and who was still a virgin. I was beginning to feel completely alone.

My Family

Before I tell you about my real family, let me tell you about my idea of what the best family is supposed to be like. I’ll tell you right now that I know people who are like this, so don’t say I’m making it up.

They are all-American-type people from San Antonio, Texas. They enjoy hiking and camping and family road trips. I wouldn’t call them religious fanatics, but they do have a strong belief in God. They even keep their family photo album in a fireproof safe.

They are a lot of other things, too. They are good to the point of being disgusting. They don’t swear. They never say they hate anyone.

I have never been to their house, but I imagine that above the fireplace they have a family portrait done at Sears with one of those awful blue backgrounds. In the picture the girls are probably wearing coordinated outfits—not the same outfit, but coordinated. There are two boys to balance out the girls in the family. Everyone is intelligent and works extremely hard, so they get good grades. They are all athletes, including the parents.

The family has a lot of home-cooked meals: barbecues, Sunday dinners, Tuesday-night tacos. They go on trips with other families. The parents don’t have great jobs, but they earn a respectable amount of money. I guess they are middle class. I think the ideal family would be that, because too many times in my experience the rich get away with things too easily. In a lot of ways it is better, more wholesome, to be middle class.

Even though I had my own ideas about this “ideal” family, I didn’t want any part of it. All I really wanted was for my biological parents to be in love and still married.

On many levels, my family is probably closer to the American reality than my ideal. Our relationships are complicated, and everyone is extremely busy. We are nothing like the people in the Sears portrait.

I am the middle of three sisters. Abby is four years older than me. Carrie is four years younger. Her father is David, my stepfather. Abby and I are both from my mother’s first marriage, to a man who left her before I could even crawl.

Because my mother had to work hard to support us, for all of my life we have had various housekeepers and nannies. They did everything for us—cooked, cleaned, and ran all of our errands. But despite all their efforts I always wished I’d had a nanny like the one in the Harriet the Spy books. A nanny who would talk to me. Except for one, they never really seemed to understand me, plus they were always leaving and being replaced, so I never felt attached to or comfortable with them.

In addition to the nannies, we’ve always had a cleaning lady. My parents don’t like cleaning (although they will do it when forced), and I have never been assigned chores because my parents don’t believe in them. My mother’s philosophy is that kids should be kids when they are kids—they have the rest of their lives to clean house.

When I was thirteen, I was much closer to Abby than I was to Carrie. Abby and I teased each other a lot. I made fun of her hair, which is curly and uncontrollable, like a perm gone bad. She made fun of my chest—which was size A—and, well, Abby was more than fully developed by the time she was fifteen. Abby and I also competed over height, but it didn’t matter, because we were both short.

Even though Abby is four years older than me, every one always thinks that she is younger. She has an innocent face—freckles, curly blonde hair, blue eyes, tiny nose—that makes her look thirteen even though she’s now in college. Despite her appearance, she’s able to handle herself in most adult situations, and I learn a lot from her. When I was eleven, we were allowed to go into New York City alone to see the musical Damn Yankees. Just being with Abby made me feel grown-up.

When we got into the city I was hungry. Abby was probably hungry, too, but we had exactly three dollars between us, so she was not about to buy me food. But I persisted with my complaining, and she eventually relented. We went into Starbucks, bought a small lemon cake, and split it. Afterward I was dying of thirst, but we were out of money. I ended up taking one of their printed advertisements and making a little paper cup so that I could drink the milk that was set out for the coffee. This might sound small, but it was the kind of adventure I had only with Abby. With her, I could be myself and have fun.

Over the years Abby and I have done most of the same things, so it has been easy for my mother and my stepfather to compare us. Of course, we did it ourselves, too. I remember when I received my scores for the Connecticut State Mastery Tests. My mom suggested that I get out Abby’s old scores and we laid them both on the table side by side. Mom insisted on comparing both the overall scores and those for the individual sections. She did it out of curiosity, not to pit us against each other, but I still felt bad as I realized I had the lower scores.

Even though Abby and I had fun times together in the past, our relationship has been at its best in the years since she moved out of the house to go to a private school in New Hampshire. With her gone, there was less competing, fight ing, and arguing. Unfortunately, there was also less time for us to really talk. I wish Abby and I had had those talks about guys that you see sisters have in movies, but even back then I knew more about dating than Abby. Abby was seventeen and she had never been kissed. It wasn’t because she was ugly, but because she was shy and didn’t really care about dating. She was a very by-the-book type of girl, and that book would be called How to Be a Good Girl.

Abby’s move to boarding school, which happened when she was fifteen and I was eleven, meant that Carrie and I were the only ones left at home. Suddenly the sense of competition shifted. Now Carrie and I were always comparing ourselves. I may have been the better student—that was clear—but Carrie had begun swimming at meets at a younger age than I had. When it came to swimming, she had the edge, and it bothered me.

My mother kept the score sheets that showed how we had done at each meet. Sometimes, if she really got going at it, she would make spreadsheets of our scores. No one ever came right out and said that Carrie was a better swimmer than me, but you could see it in the numbers.

Swimming was not the only area where the littlest sister had a real advantage. Carrie is the only one of us who is David’s biological daughter, and this means she is the only one who lives with both of her real parents. To me it seemed like David favored her. I wasn’t just jealous of his attention. It was more the fact that she had her actual father to talk to. To make things worse, like all my friends who had two parents at home, Carrie didn’t seem to appreciate what she had.

When we were together, Carrie and I were likely to get into some kind of argument and it often escalated into push ing, shoving, pinching, or slapping. I think my jealousy contributed to our fighting, but it was never the specific cause. Usually it started when she did something that annoyed me—like crossing the invisible boundary in the backseat of the car—or took something of mine. This happened all the time with clothes. We raided each other’s closets almost every day, and then argued over who took what and how it was or wasn’t returned.

One of these times I came home from school to see her wearing my favorite white sleeveless oxford shirt from The Gap. She had never asked to borrow it and lamely explained that I had taken something from her room and therefore she was entitled to wear my shirt. This was probably true, but I wasn’t in the mood to accept it. Arguing became yelling, and finally Carrie pulled out a blue permanent marker and scribbled all over the shirt while she was still wearing it. “You can have it now,” she sneered.

You might wonder where my parents were when this kind of thing occurred. Usually they were out, but even if they were home, they often just told us to work things out ourselves. In this constant war, they would intervene only if things got physical. In the case of the oxford shirt, all my mother said was that she would buy me a new one. It never happened. And Carrie was never punished.

Sometimes I am amazed that Carrie and I are still living and breathing, considering how much we fought when we were younger. Although my grandmother says it is healthy for kids to fight, I think we pushed it to the limit. The funny thing is, our fights were usually about nothing. I guess that is why my parents used to tell me, “You have to choose your battles wisely.”

The most influential person in my life is my mother. Just from the way my mother looks, you can tell she is very proper and demanding. She is tall, about five foot ten, and she is pretty large. She has always fluctuated in weight, but no matter what, I have always thought she was pretty. I guess everyone’s mother is pretty in their eyes, but I truly believe my mom is a beautiful person.

My mother liked to talk about being a great pioneer in a male-dominated workforce. She said she helped break the glass ceiling, and I admired her success in the business world. Since she was the primary breadwinner in the family, she controlled the house with an iron hand. It was funny, though—she liked to talk about how much she hated men, but she acted just like them.

Even though my mom could be strict, she was also a mentor and a best friend. I love it when people tell me that I look just like my mother. We do look a lot alike, but I also hope the similarities run a little deeper.

I have always known that my biological father was pretty much an asshole. However, when I was very young—seven or eight—I didn’t want to admit this to myself or to my friends. He and my mother met in college, and I like to fantasize that they courted like the couple in Love Story.

My parents were separated and practically divorced before I was even conceived. It happened one weekend when my father came to visit with my sister and then stayed on for an extended period. My mother claims that she went along with it—planned it even—because she wanted to have another child and didn’t believe that she would ever remarry. I wish that I had been conceived out of love.

As far as I can remember, I was actually in my father’s presence just once, when I was about five. He had just met a woman he liked at his office, and I believe he was using my sister and me to impress her. He told my mom this woman was a real find because she had had her tubes tied. So, on a Saturday he picked up Abby and me and took us to an amusement park. For some reason he started calling me Kitty. He continued to call me that throughout the afternoon. At the end he bought each of us a stuffed bear. I got a white polar bear. I still have it. I’m not entirely sure why I’ve held on to it, because I know I felt as if I had spent that entire day with a complete stranger.

My mother married David when I was four. I didn’t understand what marriage was then. And when David’s parents came up to Abby and me and declared that they were our new grandparents, I told them we already had grand- parents and didn’t need more.

I have always held a certain image of an ideal father in my head. It’s based on what I heard about my friend’s fathers. They took their daughters to baseball games, gave them clothes they wouldn’t ordinarily get when they went shopping, and served them sugar for breakfast. David didn’t do any of this, and whenever I asked him anything the reply was, “Go ask your mother.” After a while I just stopped asking him. Going to David was a waste of time. This is why I have never considered David my father.

The thing that bothers me the most about David is that he likes to analyze my feelings over and over again. He says I am afraid of betrayal, so I never turn to him. I think that is a lot of bull. Why would I be afraid of being betrayed by him? Because my father left me? I was only a baby when my father left, so I have no painful memory of it. And besides, David had a clean slate. He could have defined what a father is for me. Instead he always told me to go to my mother for answers or for help, and she was usually working, so I was left on my own.

By the time I was thirteen I didn’t think that I should have to respect all adults. I didn’t disrespect them, but I was finding my own answers and a lot of what I was seeing and hearing about the adults around me was very hard to accept. I wanted adults to be perfect. I wanted them to be flawless role models, guides, even protectors. When you realize that most adults aren’t perfect at any of these things, you begin to lose your faith.