Full Disclosure

ONE

We watched as the tornado tore through the field of sunflowers.

It was a little skinny one, miles away from where my mom and I sat on the front steps of our building. North Dakota was so big and flat that you could sit in the bright sunshine and watch a storm blow through in the distance like a movie. This was late July, the summer we lived in a Bismarck apartment complex that looked to two-year-old me as if it had been pulled from Sesame Street. Our building was across from a sunflower farm, black and gold flowers facing east as far as you could see.

“Look at the twister,” my mom kept saying. “Look at the twister.”

I wasn’t scared. I was never that kind of kid. I was the girl who walked home from the Little People Academy preschool when I was two. Just slipped out during naptime. “I don’t nap,” I told my mother when she answered the door. She sighed. I had confounded her since birth, when the boy she had planned and decorated a nursery for turned out to be a girl. She was inconsolable for a week. I was supposed to be called Stephan Andrew after a late relative, but she and I were stuck with Stephanie Ann. If we should ever meet, call me Stormy.

That summer of the tornado, my mom bought me black roller skates with red laces and red wheels. I just loved the look of them, but she was determined to teach me how to skate. She’d put me down on the concrete and hold her arms out. “Come here,” she’d say. Sheila Gregory was beautiful then, a twenty-seven-year-old Julianne Moore look-alike with freckles and blue eyes. She wore her strawberry-blond hair long and straight, parted in the middle, a seventies look she successfully brought with her into 1981. She was short and thin, and people would say, “Aren’t you a tiny thing?”

She seemed even smaller next to my dad. Bill Gregory is six foot four, with chiseled features and olive skin owed to Cherokee blood somewhere in the line. I am a perfect combination of Sheila and Bill, a mix that could have gone horribly wrong. I had tight, super curly blond hair, and I am smart like my dad. We traveled for his work as an architectural engineer, going to new water treatment plants to map out where the electricity should go. My mom was not what you’d call a big thinker. She’d never had a job in her life, and I can’t recall her ever even picking up a book.

What my mom did care about was my father. They had a very passionate relationship, and she had a jealous redhead temper. She liked to throw things, though never at me. Just warning shots at him. She had had her pick of men and went on some dates with Kurt Russell when she was seventeen. She met him at the Louisiana State Capitol while she was with my grandmother, who had jury duty. Kurt was there shooting a movie, The Deadly Tower. He took one look at my mother and he was a smitten kitten. He asked her out and my grandparents let her go, but supervised. Even my grandmother would talk about the night Kurt Russell picked my mom up in a limo and they went to a fancy dinner. Then he didn’t get anywhere because she was underage. They held hands, so that was the end of that.

Bismarck was just a quick stop for us. We kept a house in Baton Rouge, where I was born, and my father’s parents lived next door so they could keep an eye on the place. But we were rarely there. Our Suburban was always packed up, and my dad had a matching boat, which went everywhere with us, no matter how landlocked the new place might be. Any chance he had to take it out for waterskiing, he took it. Otherwise, it was just a trailer. We’d load all our stuff in it, put the cover on, and drive to the next place.

I have a photographic memory, so I can put myself right back in every place we lived. There was Kissimmee, Florida, and the winter in Kalamazoo, which my mom hated. All she did was complain and smoke in the house because Michigan was too cold to go outside. After Bismarck we moved to Idaho Falls. We rented a house on Amy Lane, a tiny street dotted with spruces that looked like Christmas trees. We had a big beautiful backyard with a long concrete sidewalk leading to a barn that still had horse stalls. Somebody who lived there had kept horses, and I would sit in the cool of the barn, trying to summon the ghosts of these horses.

Mom made a friend, Nicky Fontenot, who I called Miss Nicky. She owned a horse named Prissy Puddin’ and she barrel raced. One day I was at the stable, and Miss Nicky was cooling out the horse after racing. Prissy was sweaty and tired, and someone put me, all of two, up on the horse to sit in front of Miss Nicky. I can remember the smell of the saddle and the horse sweat, her bay coat and black mane. It was magic, and I don’t know a time since that I haven’t wanted to ride.

I was an only child, and my mom made no secret about the fact that my father never wanted kids in the first place. I have always known that she got pregnant on purpose, and he tolerated the one. He was never bad to me, but he just didn’t have that dad instinct. He barely acknowledged my existence, and I adored him.

So naturally, when I was four and needed to start school, there was no question about my father’s lifestyle changing. It just wouldn’t. My mom and I moved into the house in Baton Rouge, and he took a job in Alaska. For a while, he sent me stuffed animals from that region. My favorite was a little husky. Dad would take pictures from his job site, great big eight-by-tens of this desolate flat land and the arctic foxes he trained to come near him by feeding them fried chicken. “I almost have them eating out of my hand,” he told me on the phone.

He wouldn’t answer when I asked when he was coming home or when I could visit.

The house on Mcclelland Court was small, with a front yard that was two equal rectangles of blacktop driveway and patchy grass. The street was a part of a horseshoe-shaped development where every house had the same look and layout. We lived in a three-bedroom ranch-style house they had no business calling a three-bedroom. I had a waterbed tucked in a vinyl-covered frame, so I at least thought that was cool. The houses next door were just a few feet away from each other, and if you want to buy one of them today, the estimated going price is twenty-four thousand dollars.

My mom took me to a dance class because I wanted to be a ballerina. My dance teacher was Miss Vicki, and her crotchety old mother, Miss Donna, owned the studio. The recital that year had a Disney theme, and I can still see my costume: baby blue and fully sequined with a little ruffle on my butt. And white tights, white tap shoes, and a white sequined hat. What’s funny is that I now have the same hat in black for when I play a magician when I do my feature dancing gigs in clubs on the road. Every time I put on the magician hat, I think back to that recital.

Backstage, it was full-on Toddlers & Tiaras, with all the Baton Rouge moms teasing out their daughters’ hair. Everyone was smoking, and my mom was trying to secure my hat to my hair by bobby-pinning it directly to my skull. With all the hair spray and polyester, I was a pint-size fire hazard for sure.

“Ow,” I screamed over and over as she pinned the hat on. “That hurts!”

Miss Donna hobbled over and shook a finger at me as she exhaled smoke. “You have to suffer to be beautiful,” she rasped. “Beauty is pain.”

Then she hobbled on, and I was speechless. But no truer words have ever been spoken. Little did I know the future would involve plucking and waxing. High heels, corsets, and underwires.

It was around then that I had my first boyfriend. Jason Beau Morgan lived next door to my mother’s mother, who I called Mawmaw Red. We were dating because I said so, telling him in my grandmother’s front yard, “You’re my boyfriend.” He had blue eyes and curly hair the color of light sand. I actually cut out a picture of his face and put it in a locket that I still have. We lost touch after elementary school, and in middle school I heard he died of a brain aneurysm. Jason was the first boy I ever held hands with.

I was especially close to Mawmaw Red and loved visiting her, not just for the chance to play tag with Jason. She would give me café au lait—with extra milk and sugar in a tall, skinny brown plastic cup—and had blocks that she hid from her other grandkids. They were just for me to play with. “You are special, Stephanie,” she would tell me in her Louisiana drawl.

Mawmaw Red had emphysema. When I went to her house in the last several months of her life, she wore an oxygen mask, and the big green tank went around the house with her until she just stayed in one room. I remember the smell of the oxygen, how it triggered memories of when we lived in Idaho and my asthma was so bad I had to be hospitalized in a crib with a bubble canopy. I pretended I was a fish in a bowl, until I got bored and decided to escape.

The August after my dad started work in Alaska, Mawmaw Red deteriorated, and my mom took me to the hospital to say good-bye. She couldn’t talk and was so close to death. I remember thinking she looked like the death scene in E.T. “You must be dead,” Elliott says to E.T. “’Cause I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything anymore. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

I spent the night at my father’s parents’ house next door, and the next day I was at home when my mom came into her room, where I was playing. I was standing by the bed and she sank down to her knees to take me by both arms.

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “Mawmaw Red died.” She was sobbing, so upset, but I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. Mawmaw’s just gone someplace else now, I thought. My mom remained distraught in the days leading up to the funeral.

Dad came home to attend, and he decided that was a good time to tell her he was leaving her. He’d met someone else. I knew her name was Susan because, well, my mother was screaming about “that whore Susan.” They sent me next door to my grandparents, but I still heard all the screaming and the sounds of plates smashing against walls as my mother went ballistic. Worse, he had brought Susan with him from Alaska, and while he was in town, my mom spotted them and tried to beat the shit out of her.

My mom was so caught up in her understandable grief that she didn’t seem to remember I existed. She was just different, listless and uninterested in doing anything with me. The next thing I knew, the Suburban was backed into the driveway with the hatch up. My dad loaded it up, just like he did all the times we’d moved as a family, only it was just his stuff. I was aware he was leaving, and as my mom screamed at him for the whole neighborhood to hear, I played quietly in the patch of front yard.

When he went in to get one last thing, my mother chased him inside to continue yelling at him. This was my chance. I climbed in the Suburban and hid myself behind some boxes. Nobody noticed I was missing, and it has never occurred to me until I’m right here writing this that he didn’t look for me to say good-bye. He just got in the Suburban, slammed the door, and drove off into his new life.

He got a couple of miles down the road when I decided the coast was clear and I could surprise him.

“Hi!” I said. I thought he would be happy. We were escaping together. Instead, he looked sad and pulled over.

“Baby, you can’t stay,” he said. “I gotta take you home.”

“I don’t wanna go home,” I said. As he did a U-turn, I began to wail, hitting boxes and crying. I just knew home wasn’t safe anymore. I have always had a good sense of things, and everything in me told me that I needed to run.

He had to pull me out of the car, and my mom screamed at both of us. She had to hold me in her grip and drag me into the house to keep me from running after the car. He married Susan, and he started his new life without me.

I didn’t see my father again for almost three years.

My mother instantly became a different person, as if my father’s leaving had triggered an Off switch. She drank Coca-Colas all day, lighting each new cigarette off the one she was just finishing, then stubbing it out in an ashtray or whatever was close. She didn’t care what she looked like, and her hair became gray and got curly, seemingly overnight. Thirty years old and she had to go to work for the first time in her life. She got a waitressing job at a restaurant called Café Lagrange, and then a second job working at Tigator trucking company across the bridge in Port Allen, Louisiana. When the restaurant closed down, she took on more work at Tigator. They had a fleet of blaze-orange eighteen-wheelers, all with a logo of a two-headed animal that was part tiger, part alligator.

She had been a great mom, but now she paid less and less attention to me. Part of it was that she now had to work these minimum-wage jobs, but mostly I think my father just broke her heart. She quickly devolved, and a lot of people wondered if she was doing drugs or drinking. I wish she had been, because her actions would make more sense. I’ve seen my mom drunk maybe five times. On wine coolers at barbecues, places where it’s perfectly appropriate to relax and do that.

My dad left and my mom never cleaned the house or even did dishes again. It was so gross, but it became just how I grew up. I am not a clean freak and I am not OCD. I can do so much damage cluttering up a hotel room in two days, you cannot imagine. But there is a difference between being messy—dumping my suitcase on the floor to find the one thing I cannot find—and being dirty. This was fucking dirty.

At least I could go next door to my grandparents’ house for a little normalcy, but that ended when my grandmother passed away when I was six. My grandfather sold the house as quick as he could and moved to Mississippi. A couple moved in with a little boy named Travis. He was six months younger than me, and we became best friends.

Grandpa sold just in time. My mom and the neighborhood were in a race to see which could go downhill faster. The population of the neighborhood changed just as the crack epidemic hit Baton Rouge. What was once a stable, working-class neighborhood became a real-time loop of Cops. Even the yards gave up. The trees and lawns all died, and cars started getting parked in the yard.

Rats moved in, and their poop was all over the house. They loved the third bedroom, which became a literal junk room. They could have it. The real problem was roaches. They were everywhere in the house and no place was safe. I had a waterbed and I don’t think my mother washed those sheets once after Dad left. The roaches hid in it, waiting for me. I have scars on my legs from where they would bite me.

We had this toothbrush holder, a plastic teddy bear that had holes in his hands and feet to hold two kids’ brushes. When it was new, you could pull a string and the bear’s arms and legs moved as he blinked at you. But my toothbrush had outgrown it, and the teddy bear sat empty on the wall for the roaches to turn into another nest. I’d look in the holes and the roaches would just be in there, their antennae waving at me like, “Fuck you.” It bothered me because I could remember when it was new and clean, when we had Dad around and I had a real mom.

There were many days I came home from school to no electricity. We were always getting shut off for nonpayment. I’d be home alone after school, the house getting darker as the sun got closer to setting. I wasn’t scared, but I was bored and hungry. I’d go out and ride my bike, which wasn’t really safe in the neighborhood, or go hang out at a friend’s house. I had a lot of friends from school and the neighborhood, though in those days I never once had anyone over. “I’ll come to your house,” I’d say. “You guys have better snacks.” Travis next door was always fun to play with. He taught me how to ride a bike, and we took turns with his. Who else was going to teach me?

Travis was great, but he wasn’t a crush or anything like that. Back then I had eyes for Tanya Roberts in 1984’s Sheena. I saw the movie on TV—a sort of female version of Tarzan—and I’ve never forgotten the thrill I felt watching her. She was perfection, a blonde with phenomenal boobs in a torn-up makeshift bikini. Tanya played an orphan raised by an African tribe, who can communicate with animals. What drew me in was that Sheena is as strong as she is pretty. She gets the bad guy by shooting him in the heart with an arrow, then saves the boyfriend and then sends him home to America so she can ride off on a zebra.

The hot girl who saves the day. Who wouldn’t fall for her?

My dad remarried and I guess Susan, who I had still never met, suggested that maybe he should see his daughter. In the three years since I had tried to run away with him, they had moved to Philadelphia. I was six, and my dad wanted me to fly up by myself. There were a lot of screaming phone calls. My mom felt strongly that if he wanted to see me, he should come get me, and this is one of the rare cases where I was on her side. I was not an outgoing kid, so if I was lost or something happened, I would have just decided to live in the airport rather than ask an adult for help.

Susan flew down to Baton Rouge, but on reflection I think my father might have told my mom that he was coming and sent her instead. The last time my mom saw Susan she was dragging her around by the hair, and now she had to hand her daughter over to the woman who ran off with her husband. She referred to Susan as my Wicked Stepmother, and I think it pissed her off even more that Susan was so polite at the airport. We flew to Philadelphia, and I didn’t talk very much until she brought me to my dad. I was so excited to see him.

He was exactly how he was before, a little distant and not at all hands-on. He was nice enough, but I don’t think he had any idea what to make of me. Their town house wasn’t a mansion, but to me it was. It was clean and didn’t reek of smoke.

“The first thing we’re gonna do is wash all these clothes,” Susan said, recoiling from the stale smell of smoke as she unpacked my bag. She bought me a ton of new clothes and seemed way more excited about seeing me than my dad did. I actually spent very little time with him that week, except for when he took me to see the Liberty Bell. This was back when you could still touch it, and he held me up to reach my hand to the crack in the bell. I remember it so vividly, me in my pink jacket and pigtails, touching history.

I spent the week sleeping on their living room floor, right by a floor-to-ceiling glass window and a door that led to their back patio, which was like a mini yard. The window had huge vertical blinds, and one morning at about 5 A.M. I saw a shadow go across the ceiling. I crawled over and looked through the blinds. I so wish you could have seen this: There were bunnies everywhere. There were about twenty of them, all doing mating dances, leaping into the air and darting under each other like a goddamned bunny ballet. I thought, Am I dreaming?

Dad had to see this. I ran to their bedroom and woke him and Susan, and neither of them was impressed. “Go back to bed,” my dad said.

After that week, they—and I’m sure it was just Susan—set up a schedule of visits. I’d go see them for a couple of weeks in the summer and then either around Christmas or Easter. All my birthday cards and Christmas cards came from her, with her signing his name for him. Every time I went to see them, it was like going to Narnia. Each visit started with washing my clothes. She was kind and set up art projects for us to do, but she was not pushy. She didn’t want to play Mom for the week, and I wasn’t looking for one. I wasn’t searching for anything from my dad, either. I’d stowed away in his car and he’d brought me home. I can take a hint.

No, the trips weren’t about him. This was a short period of time where I slept in a clean bed, there was food, and my asthma wasn’t acting up from my mom’s chain-smoking.

And then I’d go home.

After Dad, my mom dated this parade of horrible guys. It was like if someone mentioned a guy, her first question was “Is he a loser? Yeah? Sold.” None of them came on to me, which I know is what people assume happened to adult actresses to “damage them” as children. No, they were just losers.

When I was about eight, my mom started disappearing for days at a time, probably with one of the guys she was dating. There would be no food, and I just wasn’t sure how long I would have to ration out saltines or whatever was still there. When she was gone, I would watch TV until late. I loved late-night talk shows and the companionship of the last years of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Saturday nights were best, because I could watch Saturday Night Live. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon—they became my heroes. The humor just clicked with me, the thrill that I was sitting there alone in Baton Rouge, and in that very second, they were making these jokes live from New York. All of us sharing this moment.

When my mother came home, she never offered an explanation or an apology. I didn’t think she was capable of either. She wasn’t off on a romantic getaway. She probably just went to hang out at a car garage where some guy worked, went home with him, and then he drove her to whatever job she was doing. And then when she needed a ride to her car… rinse and repeat. She also hung out at a bar called the Gold Dust Lounge. I just wasn’t on her radar as a priority, and by the time I was eight she was used to treating me with less care than you would a dog.

There was one man, a big, heavy dude named Wade, who was so in love with her. Wade was a nice guy with a decent job, so she wasn’t interested. But she did use him. He would come over after work and bring us groceries. Wade always sat in the easy chair by the big picture window. I couldn’t understand why anyone would volunteer to be in the house. He didn’t mind the rat poop and didn’t seem disgusted by the roaches. He would ask me about school, which no one else did.

“It’s good,” I told him, meaning it. I had realized I was smart when I started finishing my work in class before everyone else. My friends complained about quizzes and I worried that I was missing something. At school I was a leader. Not in a Mean Girls kind of way, but when we played games or pretended we were wild horses galloping around, I was always the leader and no one ever questioned it. There was never anyone saying, “I’m gonna be the leader today.” It was just natural that it be me.

It was natural to me, too. I always felt like there was some kind of magic around me. Maybe you could chalk it up to my having an exceptional imagination as a kid, but not all of it. There was a vibration that people picked up on. Like the universe had a plan for me.

By the end of fourth grade, I had found my first bad boy. Damien MacMorris was in my class, and his mom, Sharon, was friends with my mom. They lived in a mobile home in a trailer park. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was always, always in trouble. He was my boyfriend, though we’d never kissed.

His parents were divorced, and on the last day of school, he was going to live at his dad’s. My mom and I were over at his place, and Sheila and Sharon chain-smoked in the trailer, probably talking about how men suck. I didn’t know if Damien was leaving for the summer or for good, but I had a feeling this was the last time we were going to see each other.

The trailer park had concrete pads, and the spot next to his had no mobile home on it. We were sharpening sticks and using them to draw on the cement.

“I’m gonna miss you,” I said.

He looked down and absently started singing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.” It was still on the radio all the time.

“Why are you singing that?” I asked.

“’Cause it reminds me of you,” Damien said. “I’ll think of you every time I hear it.”

His mom poked her head out of the door. “Your dad’s coming to get you in thirty minutes!” Sharon hollered. “Is all your stuff packed to go?”

“Yeah!” he yelled.

This horrible anxiety seized me, a feeling that I would never see him again. I dropped my stick, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him behind a tree to kiss him. My very first time. I think in my rush, I missed the target and kissed him more on the side of the lips, but it didn’t matter. It gave me the butterflies feeling of an orgasm. Like it was bad, and “What if our moms see us?”

We smiled at each other, both of us still surprised by what I’d done. I heard the wheels of a car pull up. It was his dad. Damien got in the car and I never saw him again.

I found out years later that he died—the rumor was that he was shot to death. He was bad. If you’re keeping score, yes, number one and number two are dead. Fucking black widow.

Twenty years later, I was driving when “You Give Love a Bad Name” came on the radio. I’d never really listened to the lyrics, and as I did my mind wandered back to that day when I kissed Damien. I nearly drove off the road when it got to the line, “Your very first kiss was your first kiss good-bye.” Thanks for the memory, Damien.

When Damien moved away, I moved on to kissing my next great love, Patrick Swayze. I had a poster of him in my room because I loved him so much in Dirty Dancing. I kissed a hole in that poster. That movie is still my favorite, and I can still do every dance step. I was Baby for Halloween three years in a row as a kid. The real draw was Patrick, who I knew from an interview raised horses. I remember him saying he had two Straight Egyptian purebred Arabians, and four “fun horses” in California.

I was in Cincinnati visiting my dad in his new house and was probably talking about Patrick Swayze having horses when Susan interrupted me.

“You know,” she said, “I grew up with horses.”

“What?” I said. It was like she told me she was part fairy. She got out her scrapbook from when she was a kid in Palos Verdes, California. The best part was that she had clippings from her horse’s mane in it. I touched it, thinking of Prissy Puddin’, the horse I rode with Miss Nicky when I was two. The hair was still silky, but so strong.

“Her name was Tasine,” Susan said. “We had her mother, Taffy, and the dad’s name was Jacine.” She showed me pictures of her riding English, so formal in her flat saddle with both hands on the reins. She had the breeches and boots, and a huge smile under her equestrian helmet. Seeing the photos, I realized that not only did I love horses, I loved that type of riding.

Susan was the first person sympathetic to that need to ride. Horse people can spot each other. The following year, when I was nine, she took me for my very first official English horseback riding lesson at Derbyshire Stables in Cincinnati. I rode a horse named Kiowa, and Susan bought me my first pair of riding boots. When I put them on, it was my Cinderella moment. I felt hot and powerful. They weren’t even nice ones and looked cheap, but I didn’t care. I was a horseback rider. After that, I pushed for more and more visits because I knew she would take me for lessons.

Back home, I rode my bike like I was on Kiowa, my territory extending around the horseshoe-shaped development of our neighborhood. One day I was out riding when I met a girl named Vanessa the way kids do, pausing to stare at each other until one says, “Do you wanna play?”

I dropped my bike as an answer, and we pretended we were horses in the pasture. I became best friends with Vanessa, whom I am still so protective of that I want to be up front with you and say that’s not her real name. She was a year and a half younger than me, and sometimes the age difference showed enough that I felt like a big sister. Vanessa sometimes seemed even younger because she had a problem with wetting her pants. It happened every time she laughed, even when she had just gone to the bathroom. She was ashamed about it, and I would try to make it less of a big deal, pressing Pause on the playtime and helping her inside to change before her mom saw.

“You’re okay,” I would say, partly because I often felt responsible for the problem because I had made her laugh. It was easy to slip by her mom, since she had a bunch of kids crammed into a tiny house the same size as mine. In the summer she watched older kids, too. My mother had me go over there for the day, and I’m not sure if she paid Vanessa’s mom anything or if she just figured I would be hanging out with Vanessa anyway.

One day when I was nine I rode my bike over and I couldn’t find Vanessa. By then I could just walk into the house. Her mom was changing a diaper. “She’s next door watching a movie,” she said.

It was weird, because I didn’t know a kid lived there. I’d only ever seen a guy in his forties, always home because he didn’t seem to have a job. I walked over and knocked on the door, anxious to see this new boy or girl who was stealing my friend. Then I heard a man’s voice yell, “Just a minute!”

He was at the door, opening it just a crack, then more when he saw me. It was the guy I always saw there. “Come in!” he said, too much excitement in his voice. “We were just watching a movie.”

Vanessa stood in the hall between the living room and the back bedroom, alternating between looking down and then at me, again and again. He was also looking back and forth at us, I guess trying to tell what we were saying to each other without words. Top Gun was on, Goose and Maverick turning and looping through the air. The movie just kept playing, none of us looking at the TV. I had interrupted something.

“Do you want juice?” he asked, moving to the kitchen to get it before waiting for an answer. “Vanessa, sit and watch the movie,” he said, and then to me, “Have you seen Top Gun? I have a lot of movies to watch.” He pointed to the room that in our house was the junk room left to the rats. Here, the room was floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS tapes, the names of films taped off the TV scrawled on the side. Every eighties film you can imagine, he had.

He was suddenly behind me. “Come sit,” he said. “Watch the movie.” Vanessa was on the couch, still not talking. I sat next to her, and he seemed flustered, as if he wanted to sit between us. Vanessa and I watched the movie, but he kept looking at us. Onscreen, Goose ejected during a firefight, hit the cockpit glass, and fell dead into the ocean. Maverick was cradling him in the water.

“Vanessa,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”

She ignored him, so I answered. “What?”

“Come on, Vanessa,” he said. “Come in the back and talk to me.”

I made a decision. Whatever was back there, I needed to know about. “No,” I said. “I wanna go in the back and talk to you.”

He got up quickly and walked down the hall. “It’s a secret,” he said. When I entered, he closed the door behind me.

I was wearing the hot pink cotton bicycle shorts that were so big in the eighties and a huge shirt my mom got at Kmart. It was white and had three girls on it holding surfboards with raised puffy paint designs. I looked down at my clear jelly sandals, the ones I loved so much even though they made everyone’s feet smell so bad. He took off my clothes, and the feeling I most remember is shock at what was happening.

I was nine. I was a child, and then I wasn’t.

It was the start of two years of this man sexually assaulting me. He was raping Vanessa, so I put myself between them, continually offering myself up so he would leave her alone. She was fragile and younger, I thought in my kid logic, and I was not. I would bike to her home, and when I realized she was inside his house, I would bang on the door until he let me in. There would be the pretense of watching a movie, which would lead to him making a move on Vanessa and me demanding that he “talk” to me instead. Everything would be finished by four thirty, when his wife would come home from work.

In summer, the assault was near daily. Vanessa’s mom watched a boy my age, Randy, who tried to get in to watch movies. “He’s a boy,” the man told us, “so he can’t come in.” You’re asking why Vanessa went over there so much. I know, I did, too. I can’t guess what hold he had on her. I don’t blame her, because she was a child doing what an adult told her she was supposed to do. I blame the adults in our lives. How did her mom let her be there every day for hours, feet from her house, and not know? Vanessa’s mom was deeply religious and very traditional, way more protective of her daughter than my disappearing-act mom. Why was this such a blind spot?

A year into the abuse, when I was ten, I slept over at Vanessa’s house. We were up playing past lights-out, just these two normal kids feeling naughty for staying up. When I started to get tired, I figured I should go pee. The hallway was dark, but there was light in the living room. Her parents had people over, a man and a woman. As I crept to the bathroom, I noticed they were using the hushed whispers that grown-ups talk in when they’re trying not to be overheard. The voice that automatically lets you know they’re talking about something that you’re not supposed to hear. Which of course just makes you want to hear it. I crept just a little farther down.

“I just don’t see why you let her play with Vanessa,” said the male friend.

“I don’t know,” her dad said. “We try to do what’s right and not judge, but yeah, she’s white trash.”

“The poor thing’s never gonna amount to nothing,” Vanessa’s mother said. “Not with that mama. Vanessa’s room will smell like cigarettes tomorrow. Watch.”

“She smokes?” asked the female friend.

“Naw, it’s that mom,” said Vanessa’s mother.

“She will soon enough,” said Vanessa’s dad, “and probably try to get Vanessa into it.”

They moved on to the weather, having decimated me. My face was burning hot, and I walked into the bathroom and quietly closed the door before I started sobbing. I looked in the mirror and for the first time I saw what they saw. The dirty clothes, the hair my mother never touched. I pulled up my T-shirt, first to wipe my eyes, then to try to huff in the smell of smoke that maybe I had grown used to. All this time, these people thought I was trash. My mother’s neglect, being sexually abused next door, just twenty feet away from where they were sitting discussing me—it was all to be expected for someone who wouldn’t amount to anything.

And then I got angry. I washed my face, slapping cold water on it to stop my crying. I leaned in toward the mirror, and I said two little words that have made all the difference.

“Fuck them,” I whispered. I was going to prove them wrong. It was the start of a coping mechanism that has gotten me through every traumatic event in my life: I keep moving. I’m not the kind of person to stay in one place. If I’m not going forward, I know I will go backward. So I just keep going.

It’s part of why I never sought help from an adult to stop the abuse. I thought that would just affirm what people thought about me. I suppose that’s what a serial abuser counts on—the notion that kids blame themselves. If you didn’t tell the first time, it’s harder to tell the second time. Vanessa’s parents would probably think I liked it. Besides, in my world, adults were not people who helped you. I was on my own protecting Vanessa, and taking her place was the only way I knew how. And when adults did get involved, they let us down. I am sure there were other girls he raped, because when I was eleven years old, near the end of the summer of 1990, he got into trouble when he made some kind of move on the visiting family member of another neighbor girl. She told her parents, who called the cops.

The police showed up at my house, two men at the door. My mom happened to be home, and she opened the door just a crack to talk to them. I stood in the living room as they talked quietly. I heard my name, and she told them, “Hold on,” and closed the door.

She said the man’s name. “They wanna know if he’s ever done anything inappropriate,” she said. “If there’s something you need to tell me, you tell me privately. Because if I let them in they’ll take you away and I’ll never see you again.”

My mom looked around the room quickly—there was a glimmer of shame I’d never seen from her about the state of the house. The bugs and the rats, the filth surrounding us. She was right—anyone in their right mind would take a child out of that house.

“No,” I said. I am a terrible liar, and my mother knew it. She just didn’t want to let the police see how we were living. She opened the door again, still just an inch.

“She said he’s never done anything to her,” my mom said flatly. “Okay? Bye.” My mom closed the door on them and any discussion about what had really been happening to me. She lit a cigarette and never brought it up again.

As far as I know, he never did any jail time, but Vanessa stopped going over there. I don’t know if he was spooked or her parents told her to stop going. Vanessa and I drifted apart as friends when I started seventh grade at Istrouma Middle Magnet School around that time. When I saw her, she acted like I was just someone she knew vaguely. I accepted that, because I was already doing my own work of burying the abuse and moving on as if it had never happened. I started “dating” a boy at school, meaning we held hands and wrote each other notes. Michael lived down the block from me and had brown hair and the cutest nose. We dated for a few months and he was so great—until he dumped me on Valentine’s Day. He did it just as all the other girls were getting their valentines, and I have always suspected that he broke up with me to avoid the embarrassment of telling me he didn’t get me a card.

Not long after, we were getting off the bus from the school, him behind me, and he grabbed my ass. He had done things like that before, but now we weren’t dating. I reacted with an insane fury, with all my pent-up anger focused on him. I pushed him, and when he pushed me back, I lunged at him, jumping him and throwing him to the ground. While other kids watched, we rolled around someone’s front yard, with me punctuating my slaps and blows with “That. Is. Not. Okay.”

He got away from me, and we called it a draw. “You do not get to do that,” I yelled.

“Okay,” he said, dusting himself off. “Okay.”

Someone told on us, and since we were just coming off the bus we got suspended for a day. They called our parents in and my mom actually showed up. His mom, Terry, a bus driver, came in, and seemed relieved that Michael and I had already made up. But my mom made a scene, making the most of the attention on her. As Michael and I sat in little plastic chairs outside Principal Patim’s, we could hear my mother rant inside. When Mr. Patim refused to lift the suspension, my mother stood on his desk and yelled, “You just taught my daughter that it’s okay to be sexually assaulted.”

Michael and I exchanged a wide-eyed look. For him, it was insane to see and hear a parent acting that crazy, saying those words. But as I waited for my mom’s performance to end, I played the words over in my head, “sexually assaulted.” That is what had happened to me for two years, and she knew. If anyone had tried to teach me that I needed to be “okay” with being raped, it was her. As an accomplice in silencing me, maybe this was the alibi she was telling herself: her daughter’s first brush with assault was a boy grabbing her butt, not the continual rape she chose to believe never happened because it would have exposed her negligence.

The following year, Vanessa started at my middle school and was having crippling anxiety. There was an incident, I don’t know what, but it was enough of one that she had to see a guidance counselor. She told him what she had been through. I guess she said my name, because he called me in.

“Is what Vanessa is saying happened to her true?” he said, looking across the desk at me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Were you there?”

“Yes,” I said, and finally I was able to say it. “He did it to me, too.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“Saying what?” I asked. “He—”

“Vanessa has real problems,” he said. “He didn’t touch you.”

“He did, I swear.”

“Then why are you fine?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Was I?

“Because you’re making it up,” he said. “I don’t know why you would lie about this. Are you jealous of the attention she’s getting? Is that it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why would you lie?”

I didn’t answer. I looked at my hands until he told me to leave. I’d finally outright asked for help from an adult, and I was called a liar. Vanessa stopped talking to me altogether, pretending I didn’t exist if we walked by each other in the hall. She seemed to hold her breath until I was gone, like kids do when they pass a cemetery. I respected that and didn’t push her. Maybe I reminded her of the room, or maybe she felt responsible for what that man had done to me.

Vanessa and I still have mutual friends, so I know she has created a nice life doing the profession she dreamed about doing as a kid. I hesitated to even share this here because I know how quickly my truth will be used against me by people who want to prove that women involved in the adult entertainment business are all “damaged.” In a recent survey of two thousand people, 81 percent of the women alleged they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. Did they all become porn stars? By that logic, if you polled a hundred female surgeons—or politicians—would none of the women say that they got through growing up female scot-free? Vanessa and I endured assaults from the same man. Why isn’t she doing porn?

After the guidance counselor, I never told a single person about the sexual abuse until this past June. I had been so successful blocking out what happened to me that it only came up when I recently went back to my old horseshoe neighborhood for a profile of my life. To show them my childhood home, we had to drive by the house where I was continually assaulted. Seeing it brought back a flood of feelings, and I broke down. I am still receiving flashes of memory, moments too graphic and sickening for me to share. Mainly it just hurts to remember being that vulnerable.

Being a rape survivor does not define me at all. If anything, what was ingrained into me was the expectation that I would not be believed if I ever asked for help. It’s why I keep highlighting this whole passage, my finger hovering over the Delete key. What stops me is seeing a bracelet on my right hand, a blue rubber one that I give out to people at events. In white type there is a quote from me: “Standing up to bullies is kind of my thing.”

I may not always want to, and I may fear what will happen when I do, but I have to tell the truth. This is mine.

My mom kept stumbling into dead-end relationships with guys, and Wade would still come around to sit in the front room. That only ended when she started dating Sidney Kelley. He was really nice and had a good job. What was the draw for my mom? you might wonder. Well, he was also a raging alcoholic. He had four kids of his own already. A boy, Trey, who was a year younger than me, and a set of Satan twins, two girls who were four years younger than me. They lived with their mom, Carla. He also had a bonus baby, Hope, who lived with her mom. She was two years old and the reason he was no longer with Carla.

I was told to call him Mr. Kelley, and that continued even after my mom married him when I was eleven and he became my stepdad. He moved in with us, and my mom found a new villain in Carla. “Carla’s such a bitch and she doesn’t want the kids over” was a constant refrain. Well, I wouldn’t want my kids in that filthy house, either. Team Carla here.

Mr. Kelley drank all the time and would be falling-down drunk around the neighbors. Even in our increasingly trashy neighborhood, it was like Whoa. One time at home he fell into the picture window. He hit it with his head and it shattered but didn’t break. They taped it up and it stayed shattered all through middle school and high school. It stayed that way for ten years.

In seventh grade, I met a girl name Myranda who was a year younger than me. I was walking by her when she mentioned to her friend that she wasn’t taking the bus because her mom was picking her up for a riding lesson.

“Hi,” I said, immediately latching on to her. I may as well have said, “Hi, new best friend. You’re going to be my friend whether you like it or not.” She was woefully ignorant about the riding lessons, so I realized I needed to speak to a manager. Her mom.

“Tell me about these riding lessons,” I said. “Where do you go?” This was pre-internet, and my mom knew nothing about horses. I needed to make this happen. I had her call my mom to tell her about it, and I started taking lessons with a trainer named Miss Cathy at four thirty in the afternoon every Wednesday. Myranda’s mom would pick us up from school and drive us out to the barn, and she would often take me home, too.

For months, my entire week revolved around Wednesdays.

A week before Christmas 1991, my stepdad Mr. Kelley told me he was going to pick me up that night when my lesson was over. He was getting his Christmas bonus and he was going to take me shopping so I could buy presents for people and myself.

I sat in the barn waiting. Myranda’s mom came and lingered, twice asking if maybe she could just take me home. “No, thank you,” I said. My riding instructor, Miss Cathy, busied herself tending to a pathetic horse that had been returned that day. Her name was Perfect Jade, and she was rail thin and had clearly been abused since leaving the barn. She was covered in fungus and was so mangy, I couldn’t tell what color she was. She was mean from all her mistreatment, and Miss Cathy told me to stay clear.

When Mr. Kelley finally showed up, he was shit-faced.

“I’m not getting in the car,” I said. Miss Cathy came over and immediately took stock of the situation.

“She can stay here until Sheila gets off work,” she said.

“Come on,” he said.

“She can stay here,” Cathy said, in the same tone she used to show a horse who was in charge.

“Well, she’s been wanting a horse for Christmas,” he slurred. “So how much does a horse cost?”

“Well, Chiffon’s eight grand,” said Cathy.

“For a fucking horse?” he spit. I now own a fifty-thousand-dollar horse, but that would have been a lot then for Chiffon. Cathy made so much money off that horse, using it for therapy and riding. I know now if you have a horse you don’t want to sell, you put a price on it no one wants to spend.

Mr. Kelley tried one more time to get me to go with him, and then finally gave up. “Well, here’s the money for your presents,” he said, handing me five hundred dollars cash. He got in the car and raced off.

Miss Cathy went to the office to call my mom at work. “It’s a shame he didn’t ask about this one,” she said, gesturing to poor Perfect Jade. “I’d sell you that one for five hundred.”

“Okay,” I said as fast as I could reach for the money in my pocket. “Done.”

And so Perfect Jade was mine. I told my mom later that Mr. Kelley bought her for me. She confronted him about it the next day, but he’d been so drunk he didn’t remember what happened. No one was going to take my horse away from me.

When Miss Cathy gave me Perfect Jade’s papers, I knew it was meant to be. We had the same St. Patrick’s Day birthday, though she was two years older. She was an ex-racehorse, and because she was a Thoroughbred, her papers listed her bloodlines. Her grandfather was Bold Ruler, an American Thoroughbred Hall of Fame racehorse who was named 1957 Horse of the Year. His broodmare grandmother, Primonetta, was one of the top fillies in American racing in 1961, and when she died of a heart attack just shy of thirty-five years old in 1993, she was the third-longest-lived filly known to horse racing. Jade’s bloodlines were so good, I am sure they probably tried to breed her at some point and it just didn’t take.

But looking at her when I met her, you would never know she came from glory. She had this pencil-thin neck with a mane that was so long. She had patches of hair missing from fungus, and what hair she did have was sun-bleached.

Now I had a horse, but I didn’t own anything for a horse. I didn’t have a saddle or bridle, but I couldn’t put a saddle on her anyway because she was so skinny. With no padding, it would have just rubbed blisters on her. I had to fatten her up first, but I didn’t mind because I just wanted to be near horses, period. I became obsessed with her, leading her up and down the road like a dog to get her strength up.

I loved her, but man she was mean. She would chase me out, snapping her teeth at me. If I went to pick up her back feet, she’d poop on me. I know that fucking bitch was doing it on purpose. Every time I’d turn my back she would bite the shit out of me and break skin.

One time I was feeding her and she bit me so hard, I had enough. I grabbed her ear and I bit her back. “You see?” I screamed through tears. “That hurts!”

It was a come-to-Jesus moment for us. After that, she never hurt me again.

When her hair came in that summer, it was black and sleek. Jade had grown back to being a big black mare, all filled out. She was breathtaking. I started riding her and learned everything on that horse. I was able to board her at my boyfriend Jacob Bailey’s barn. The Baileys were a farming family, so they kept a barn down the street from their house, which was close to a river. I visited Jade just about every day. And Jacob. We were both thirteen and had started dating the summer between seventh and eighth grades. He was so cute—super Christian, with an extremely conservative family. He taught me how to clean a gun and how to ride four-wheelers. Every day he would ride his four-wheeler alongside me and Jade as we galloped in the sand along the river. He could just keep up with us. He even built jumps for me as I became interested in eventing. Eventing is the equestrian triathlon, with three disciplines in one competition. There’s dressage, which is considered one of the highest forms of horse training. Then cross-country, where you and your horse navigate an outdoor obstacle course. And finally, jumping, which is specifically about clearing fences.

In December, I was at the barn cleaning Jade’s stall when Jacob got called home for dinner. It was freezing cold. Baton Rouge can still have mild weather during the day that time of year, but it can dip down to the thirties and forties at night.

“Your mom’s coming soon, right?” he said. We were both thirteen, but we looked out for each other in that way.

“Yeah,” I said. She was supposed to be there at six o’clock. Six went by, then seven. I didn’t have a cell phone to call her, so I didn’t know if or when she’d show up. I was too embarrassed to walk over to Jacob’s house. I sat in the feed room, hugging myself for warmth.

Around eight, Jacob’s mother saw the barn’s lights were still on, so she sent Jacob down. She thought I’d left without turning them off. Jacob walked in and I held out my arms to hug him. He put his coat on me, and I kissed him. We started making out, and, as they say, one thing led to another. It was my choice, and I felt completely safe with him. We had sex on top of a deep freeze they used as a feed bin. It was the first time making love for both of us, and I was blessed and cursed that I had an orgasm. It sounds good, but do you know how hard it was to find a boy to do that for the next fifteen years?

After that night, we fucked like bunnies. We would go up in the hayloft to have sex. It was always furtive and half-dressed. I don’t think I ever even saw his penis. His family was so religious that this was all wrapped up in sin.

This went on into the summer before ninth grade, when we were found out. No one ever walked in on us, as far as I know, but his parents sat him down. They told him he could never see me again, and he followed their orders. They made me move Jade out of their barn and let me know that I was a piece of white-trash shit.

This piece of shit had the straight As to get into a magnet school, so come ninth grade, I didn’t see him again anyway. Scotlandville Magnet High School, an engineering school with a focus on science and math, was about five miles from my house, but they would bus you out. It was better than going to my neighborhood school, where I probably would have been killed. I wanted Baton Rouge High because they were known for their arts programs in dance and writing, but they were full and on the wrong side of town.

Writing was all I wanted to do besides ride Jade. English was my favorite subject, and I took creative writing classes. Later I would get into all the AP English classes and become editor of my high school newspaper. With my photographic memory and an eye for detail, storytelling came naturally to me. I would always finish my work early in class, and to pass time while everyone else finished tests, I would write funny short stories about me and my friends. They were basically scripts, embellished versions of what was going on in our lives. Exactly what I do now when I write scripts for films. Just like my high school friends, my friends know that they need to be careful around me. They’ll tell me something funny that happened to them, and they’ll recognize that funny look on my face as I press Record in my mind.

“Oh, shit,” they’ll say. “I’m a script now, aren’t I?”

“You totally are,” I answer.

Back in high school, the star of most of my friend stories was my best friend, Elizabeth. We sat alphabetically in class, and her last name fell right after Gregory, so she was always right behind me from the first day of ninth grade. She had come from a small private school and knew absolutely no one at school, whereas I had moved with a crew. I turned around to say hi the first day and she was wearing a pale pink T-shirt that showed a row of cats walking from behind, their tails in the air.

“I’m sorry, is that a line of cat buttholes on your shirt?” I asked.

Elizabeth looked down, pulling her shirt out to get a better look. “I guess so,” she said.

“Okay, we’re going to be friends,” I said. “Because you really need one.”

Boy crazy and Catholic, she was the perfect wingwoman. She worked at McDonald’s all through high school, and I could always count on her to feed me free food when I was hungry, which was often. To this day, when Elizabeth and I are in the same room we are those two girls again, talking over each other about some boy and laughing. Thank God for those cat butts.

When I had to move Jade so abruptly from Jacob’s barn, I boarded her at Farr Park Equestrian Center. It became my real home. I got special permission from my high school to take a bus every day down to the LSU campus area, so I could then walk two miles south to go see her. I knew I’d lose Jade if I couldn’t afford to board her, so I started working at Farr Park, whether it was teaching kids at their summer horse camp or doing secretarial work in the office. I did anything to keep Jade with me.

I began taking lessons with a trainer, Nancy Burba, and I worked off the payment by exercising her horses. On the weekends, we started doing horse shows. At one point, somebody offered me fifteen thousand dollars for Jade. That kind of money would have been life changing, but I didn’t think about it for even a second. “She’s not for sale,” I said. Besides, Jade wouldn’t let anyone else ride her, and she wouldn’t perform for anyone else, either.

Never once did I fall off of that horse. Not one single time, which is a miracle, because it’s just a fact that you come off your horses. Whether they dump you or they spook, you come off. It’s not if you get hurt, it’s when. And how bad.

She protected me, too. We were out galloping one day, riding through a neighborhood the city was starting to develop. It had been a while since I’d ridden back there, so I didn’t know that they had dug huge drainage canals, about twenty feet across. The grass had gotten tall, so we were going full speed and I didn’t see the new canal until two strides out. I felt Jade see it and I could tell she was thinking, Fuck it, I won’t be able to stop. She leapt into the air, clearing the twenty-foot jump.

I was so scared that when I got to the other side, I got down from Jade. “Oh, my God,” I said, walking in a circle, kicking out my legs, which one second ago I was sure would be broken. “Oh, my God.” Jade nuzzled me and I looked her in the eye.

“Good job,” I said.

People who knew Jade’s history told me I saved that horse, but she saved me. Since I hated being home, if I hadn’t had the barn to go I would have just hung around my little crack neighborhood, smoking and drinking with the other kids my age. I was too busy going to horse shows on the weekends to spend time at the mall flirting with boys. I would see yet another girl who lived around me suddenly pregnant and say to myself silently, Can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant.

That meant that any guy who wanted to be around me had to make room for Jade. In my freshman year, I started dating Kris, a brown-haired tenth grader who was two years older than me. They’d held him back a year when his family moved over from Poland as a small child, but he was really smart, and his parents were biochemists at LSU studying carcinogens. He had a car and would drive me to the barn and all my horse events. Kris bought my first dressage saddle, so I could compete, and he would take pictures for me at all my shows. He was not going to get on a horse, but he bought a mountain bike so he could ride along with me and Jade. He taught me how to drive, and I’m actually a great driver because of him.

And he taught me how to say what I liked in bed. “Do you like when I touch you like this?” he would ask me, genuinely wanting me to enjoy our time together. Whereas Jacob was so conservative, Kris would just walk around naked in his room, comfortable with his body. We didn’t do anything freaky, but we had a lot of sex, and more importantly, we could talk about it without shame.

When I was sixteen, Kris wrote a letter to my mom telling her to put me on birth control. I had been too afraid to ask her. She was furious, but I heard her talking to her friends about it, saying she thought it was cool that he was honest and concerned about me. Two days later she thanked him and she put me on birth control. I have Kris to thank for my being able to enjoy sex without constantly worrying about getting pregnant and stuck in Baton Rouge.

Yes, Kris was the best boyfriend, until he cheated on me. But I don’t blame him. We were high school kids and the girl, Camille, was really fucking hot. She had an Angelina Jolie look.

I was with my best friend, Elizabeth, when I saw them. We were in her car, driving to Coffee Call, a coffee shop on College Drive in Baton Rouge. It had been Kris’s and my place. And there he was, walking in holding hands with Camille.

I sat there, my mouth open, when the radio DJ came on to present a song they’d just gotten in. Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” As Alanis sang, Elizabeth got more and more wide-eyed as I just stared at the café.

“That’s a really good song,” I said when it was over.

“Yeah,” she said, still looking at me like I was a time bomb.

“So, I’m just gonna go in there and kill him,” I said.

“Cool,” she said.

I did confront Kris. I didn’t kill him, nor did I scream-sing my new favorite song at him. He admitted it, always honest, and that was that. But whenever I hear that song, my eyes narrow and I am right back at the Coffee Call.

I did a bank shot to sink the nine ball and glanced up at my dad. For the first time, he looked proud of me. I’d waited fifteen years for that.

We were in a bar near his house on Thorn Tree Court in Miamiville, just outside Cincinnati. Susan had been making him spend more one-on-one time with me since middle school. He tried. We would run to Subway for an hour, but he just couldn’t relate to me. Now I was fifteen years old and mature enough for my age that we could finally relate.

They knew him by name when we walked in but seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It was a little bar with several pool tables, and my dad’s a very good player. He started to teach me how to play, at first probably just to pass the time. But once he saw I was pretty good, he seemed more interested. He gave me money for the jukebox, and I went over but I didn’t know how to make the selection. I’d never seen one before.

“Oh, it’s easy,” he said, coming over to show me. I looked up at him and smiled. This was what I wanted as a kid. Him showing me how to do things. “What song do you want?” he asked.

“Uh,” I said, drawing it out as I flipped through the records until I saw Def Leppard. “How about ‘Let’s Get Rocked’?”

He nodded and smiled. “Good choice,” he said. We went back to pool, and he surprised me by knowing the lyrics. We were singing and laughing, and I think he was surprised that he was actually having fun.

The next day he took me out on his boat to go waterskiing. He brought a friend with him, because you need a spotter and a driver. I picked it up pretty quickly, mainly because I was determined to impress him. I got up on the third try and as I held on, I could just see him thinking, Oh, maybe she is mine.

Other times we went out on the water, just me and him. He’d drink his Coors Light, and we got to a point where the awkwardness was almost gone. It was the same the following summer, when I was sixteen. When we were in his element—at a pool table or on the boat—he could just be quiet with me. I was just happy to be there.

It was around this time that Susan became the first I told about hating the name Stephanie. There are lots of stories about why I call myself Stormy, but the truth is that while Stephanie is a lovely name, it never suited me. First off, my mother gave it to me, and I didn’t want anything from her. And I read a lot of books about Native Americans because of my dad’s Cherokee heritage. In those stories, names reflected both character and destiny. I couldn’t rule the world with a name like Stephanie. But Stormy… that made more sense.

But then my dad and Susan split up, and with her went the person making him hang out with me. I only saw him one more time. At the end of junior year, I was sitting in class when a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Please send Stephanie down to the office. Her dad is here to pick her up.”

My best friend, Elizabeth, was in that class, and as I picked up my books she stage-whispered, “Who?”

I figured it had to be my stepdad, but he had never come to check me out of school. Mr. Kelley would never call himself my father, so the office lady must have seen a big guy and assumed. I walked quickly, worried something was wrong with my mom or my horse.

And there he was. My father, standing completely out of context in my school. I didn’t know he even knew where I went to school.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”

“Does Mom know you’re here?”

“Yeah, I just let her know,” he said, the slightest grimace crossing his face. I could guess how the call went. I was surprised the school even let him take me, because he wasn’t on any kind of form they had. We walked outside, and I saw he had his truck hooked up to his boat, full of stuff. It was just like all the moves we did when I was a kid.

“Me and Susan split up,” he said.

“I kinda heard,” I said.

“Yeah, we sold the house,” he said. “I’m on my way to California.”

“Oh.”

“I just thought I’d take you shopping,” he said, getting out his keys.

“For what?” I asked.

“How do you feel about getting a car today?”

Pretty good, actually. We hit a used-car lot and he told me I could have eight grand to spend on any car I wanted. That feels like twenty thousand these days. He told me to pick out whatever I wanted. He paid cash for a Toyota Celica that seemed pretty brand-new to me. It was dark teal, but the coolest thing about it was it had the flip-up headlights. He paid for a year of insurance on it and took me to dinner. At the restaurant, I mostly talked about how I couldn’t believe I had a new car. When it was over, he got in his car and left.

I never saw him again.

I still can’t figure out why he just handed me a car free and clear. It was nowhere near my birthday or graduation. Maybe it was just a final gift, so he could leave me again with a clear conscience. Eight grand to just be done with me.

This will shock you, but things weren’t working out between my mom and Mr. Kelley. I know, right? We were pulling for those two kids, weren’t we? Their arguments were getting increasingly frequent, and when they went at it while I was home, I just went to my room and put on my headphones. If they screamed louder, I just turned the volume up. I never got in the middle of it, and Mr. Kelley never would have hurt me.

One of the final straws was when he got out a shotgun in the house. I was on my bed, and my mom’s bedroom shared a wall with mine. He shot a hole through it and the buckshot tore through my closet, ruining all my clothes. If I had been standing up, I would have been shot.

After the initial “what the fuck?” shock, I said to myself: It might be time to get out of here. There was one more huge fight, where they were both breaking things. We already didn’t have anything, so I called Michael, the boy who’d broken up with me on Valentine’s Day in the seventh grade. He lived around the corner and his dad was a police officer. I tried to get them to come over and help me, but they wouldn’t. The neighborhood had disintegrated to such a point that this wasn’t worth getting involved in.

Finally, Mr. Kelley left. I hear he’s sober now, and I hope he’s doing great. I don’t blame him for leaving my mother. It was time for me to get out of Dodge, too.

The Christmas Tree Incident has become famous among my friends, because they had to witness it. The Christmas tree was still up in our front room, though it was January. On a Friday, my friend Anna was over to watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien with our respective boyfriends. Hers was a nice guy. And mine was Andy, who was not. At twenty years old, Andy was three years older than me and already out of school. He had long dark hair shaved on one side, ice-blue eyes, a really big penis, and a dark soul. Never toward me, but he had demons. He was super into guns and tried to be a marine to make his family proud, but he couldn’t hack it. He came home and their disappointment weighed heavy on him.

My mom was in her bedroom, and the house was quiet except for Conan. Suddenly we heard this bloodcurdling scream. It scared the shit out of us, but before we could react there was a rush of feet stomping. It was my mother running, still screaming, down the hall in her forest-green silk nightgown. She passed in front of us, jumped up on a chair—and proceeded to rip off her nightgown like the Hulk.

No underwear. None. She stood naked for one second, lost her balance, and fell back into the Christmas tree.

I moved out the next morning.

Andy and I got an apartment together for $335 a month on LSU’s campus. Andy had money from his job delivering pizza, and he had three thousand dollars in the bank from some relative dying. I kept going to high school like normal and kept up with my routine of visiting my horse, Jade, every day.

We had no furniture, unless you count a mattress on the floor and some plastic shelves for Andy’s CDs. He loved music, though he didn’t play, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and hard rock. He turned me on to all the music I still listen to today: Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Skid Row, and Poison. We would go to all-ages shows in fields to watch local bands like Acid Bath, who were my favorite. They had a song called “Bleed Me an Ocean,” a line of which I still want to get tattooed on my body: “Just like a raindrop, I was born, baby, to fall.” Around when I moved in with Andy that January of my senior year, Acid Bath came to an end when the bass player, Audie Pitre, and his parents were killed, hit head-on by a drunk driver over on Highway 24.

At one of those rock concerts in a field, our first weekend living together, most of the people there were around Andy’s age. We were all hanging out when someone pulled up in a brand-new purple Camaro. This pretty girl got out and she was a magnet for people. Everyone wanted to know how a nineteen-year-old had a Camaro, which was like a Ferrari in 1997 Baton Rouge.

“Look at my new car,” she said, as if everyone wasn’t.

“Did you get this for graduation?” I asked.

She laughed. “No, I graduated two years ago,” she said. “I bought this.”

“You did?” I said. “What do you do?”

“I’m a dancer,” she said.

I was studying ballet in high school and I was on the dance team, so I was thinking Nutcracker. “Oh, what kind of dancing do you do?”

She looked around at the people gathered, with an expression that said, What’s with this fucking chick? “Uh, I work at Cinnamon’s,” she said.

Cinnamon’s was a strip club, and the only reason I knew about it was because they had TV commercials. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Ohhhhhh.”

And before I could say anything else stupid, she said, “Yeah, if you guys are ever driving by, you should stop in and I’ll buy you all a drink.”

At the time there was a brief window when if you were eighteen you could drink in bars, thanks to the Louisiana Supreme Court finding that a drinking age of twenty-one amounted to age discrimination. But I was not even eighteen yet—I was a seventeen-year-old high schooler. So I didn’t think I’d be taking her up on the offer anytime soon.

I was wrong. Two weeks later, Andy and I were driving out by Prairieville on a Tuesday night. We had two of his friends in the back, and we drove by Cinnamon’s. “Oh, my God, that’s where that girl works,” I said. “Amy the Camaro girl.”

“You know somebody who works there?” one of the guys in the back said in this voice of excited disbelief.

“Yeah, she said we should stop in.”

Andy did a movie-worthy U-turn and we drove into the gravel parking lot.

Now, there are gentlemen’s clubs, then there are strip clubs, and then there are titty bars. Cinnamon’s was a titty bar. Basically, a trailer. It wasn’t even nice enough to be in Baton Rouge—it was across the bridge in Prairieville.

I panicked when I saw there was a bouncer checking IDs. The three guys were all over eighteen, so they got in just fine. When it was my turn, I reached into my purse, stalling by fumbling for my wallet. “Oh, yeah, lemme…,” I said. I had it in my hand, and a little voice in my head said to do something.

“Hey, is Amy working tonight?” I said her name like it was a magical spell. And it worked.

“Yeah,” he said, softening. “You’re friends with Amy?”

“She invited us.”

“Why didn’t you say something? Come on in!”

He never checked my ID. It was in my hand and he never reached for it. I crossed the threshold of Cinnamon’s and saw that our arrival had more than doubled the number of customers there. Tuesday nights were slow, I guessed. There was a guy playing video poker, and the ceiling was so low, you could reach your hand up to touch it.

Amy came out like we were old pals and bought us drinks. The guys couldn’t believe their luck. Amy called over to the dancers, “Come meet my friends!”

The girls started coming over, bored and looking for something new to talk about. A range of ages from twenties to thirties, they were all talking to me at once.

“You’re so pretty. You should do a guest set.”

“Have you ever danced before?”

“Where do you dance?”

“I’m still in school,” I said.

Only later did I realize everyone thought I meant LSU.

“We’re just going to borrow her,” Amy said to Andy.

They spirited me into the dressing room, a long rectangle with a table and chairs. It was very smoky and dirty, with two steps that went up the back to the DJ booth, which you walked through to get up to a stage that was the size of a queen-size bed. The girls began to play dress-up with me. I was Cinderella, with the bluebirds and mice making my dress and fairy godmothers making me feel special.

They muttered and cooed over their project. “Try this on,” a blonde said, handing me a bustier. Another girl said they were going to just do a little something with my eyebrows, and they all nodded. One girl got to plucking, and it hurt so much, but I’m thankful for it now. You should have seen those brows. I’d never groomed them, because my mother didn’t teach me any of that stuff. They did my makeup and did what they could with my brown hair, which I’d always just worn long and flat.

“What’s your name?” Amy asked me.

“Stormy,” I said, looking at my transformation in the mirror. I smiled. Stormy.

My fairy godmothers talked me into doing a guest set. “It’s two songs,” said Amy. “The first is up-tempo and dressed, the second is slower and more sensual as you go topless.”

I told the DJ that I would start with “Looks That Kill” by Mötley Crüe and then do “Love You to Death” by Type O Negative. He turned to a virtual wall of CDs behind him, at least four hundred, and immediately grabbed what he needed.

“I’m Dalton,” he said. “I’ll announce you, so what’s your name?”

“Stormy.”

“You want that to be your stage name?”

“Well, my real name is Stephanie, but—”

“Stephanie Stormy,” he said. “Got it.”

“Wait…”

It was too late. The music started and “Stephanie Stormy” took the stage. I was already a dancer, so I was comfortable doing that and knew how to do little movements that would look pretty. The girls were so supportive and were cheering me on and tipping me through my first song. A few more guys had come in and had a look of “We’re gonna see new titties!” The bartender came from behind the bar and tipped me, and so did the bouncer. Andy looked very proud.

The second song started and I thought, Here we go. I took my top off and no one laughed. Hunh. Cinnamon, the owner, came out of the office to watch. She was so beautiful, like a young Madeleine Stowe, with long, long dark hair. When the song was over I did a quick bow and discreetly tried to pick up all the dollar bills. I made eighty-five dollars, more money in those two songs than I made answering phones all week at the barn.

The girls ran backstage to hug me, and Cinnamon came in, too.

“Do you want a job?” she asked.

“I have school, so I can’t work during the week,” I said.

“Well, can you do Friday and Saturday nights?”

Eighty-five dollars in nine minutes. “Yeah,” I said.