Or ten.

I based my entire adolescence on a series of lies that multiplied and were completely accentuated with other ones I constructed to compliment the original lies. I am good at it, it’s true, the lying thing, especially if I don’t have to look anyone in the eyes about it.

It started fairly young. I would lie to my mother about stuff that would infuriate her, have you done your homework, have you done the dishes, did you clean the bathroom? My mother was a pristine clean freak whose idea of vigilance would be, upon spying a pair of shoes on my floor or a magazine haphazardly placed on my desk, would then proceed to empty my entire room onto the floor. I mean drawers overturned and emptied, closets strewn on the floor, desk drawers furiously emptied into the same growing pile of my shit. If things were not done properly, she would fly into a rage, pushing me across the room, etc. Her kind of tough love didn’t teach me too much but how to hide inside myself. I was not allowed or permitted to see my friends or doing anything even school-related on weeknights, be they study groups or what have you. On the weekends my curfew was 10 pm until I was 17. I was grounded literally 90% of my high school life, and everyone knew this about me, my crazy mother who would not even have enough delicacy not to hit or throw fits about my room in front of people. My friends saw it, they knew it. One commented to me recently about how fucked up it was that one time for a surprise birthday party my mother used the “your closet is a mess, go clean it before it ends up on your floor” ploy, and my friends all popped out with Happy Birthday screams.

I was like a little caged bird waiting to fly, and so I discovered pretty early how to open the cage when no one was looking. I started jumping out my window at night, and ended up in random cars with friends, going to rock shows, in weird towns drinking butterscotch schnappes and vomiting in trash cans on anonymous playgrounds, drinking sysco, smoking pot and cigarettes…I know, so classy, right? I spent a lot of time at Coffee Kingdom, messed up on caffeine, dressed to the nines (Erin and I would dress at her parent’s house). I started doing this heavily at 14, and did it hundreds of times until I was 18, when I was finally caught.

To add to the confusion, I also was able to weave other daylight lies that would allow me the freedom to participate in daytime activities. So, going to the Cape with Beth, or babysitting for Roseanne, who usually had me sleep over, happened a lot more than it ever really happened. I babysat for Roseanne when I went to Lollapalooza and saw Rage and Primus. Going to the cape with Beth was what I did when Erin and I went to Martha’s Vineyard and she totaled her car along the way. We spent the rest of the weekend in Shrewsbury, carless, running through fields petrified that my mother would recognize us waiting against the stone wall for our random rides. We would be vixened out in dresses with boots, long dark hair on both of us, looking more like sisters than best friends.

Losing my virginity was also a result of my window hopping experience. I had been grounded for three months for shoplifting at Marshalls. When I was grounded there was no phone, no tv, just music. I had this little rabbit shaped phone behind the drawers of the pink file cabinet I still own, and called this skater that I had been into for a while. The skater happened to be the best friend of my first kiss, Pat (who was the fucking worst kisser ever, by the way) and he invited me over to his house. The two mile trek wasn’t anything terrible for me to walk, since Meagan and I and Erin and I ran loose all over town, drinking and peeing champagne off the gazebo, and walking in this kid’s general neighborhood because there was a nice playground to hang out in. I knocked on his window and he let me in. I was all of 14 years old, two months before 15. The night proceeded with a strong and ridiculous argument that only the slimiest boys will use when needing to stick it in, but you are physically mature and so am I, why not. You know you want to, your body is ready why don’t you want to. Me, no, no no. I didn’t picture my first experience being some coaxed out planned event like that, but I was so eager to be seen as acceptable and cool to this kid that I kind of went along with it. When the process came to be, I was sitting on top of him, his dick covered in condom, and me saying no no no. C’mon, he says, you are ready and so am I. He proceeded to try and push himself inside me and “fuck me”. When it was over, I crawled out his window, realizing I had attained some bizarre status in the turning of the world, but felt something very wrong with the whole process. For example, someone who had been masturbating since 5 realized that not only did I never get a kiss, but there was no foreplay involved to make it even remotely natural (probably due to my incessant no no no’s). I walked home, stooping by the stone wall to check my underwear which was literally soaked with blood. In some strange way, I thought, yeah, I guess I am a woman now, not too eager with whatever that meant. I spent the next week walking stiffly, telling my mother that my back hurt from the scoliosis.

The next day everyone knew about this, including every skater in town. I had asked during the process if it was in, seeing as how I felt nothing but pain, and every fool I saw mocked me about it. I suddenly became uncool with a crowd of boys I was obsessed with watching skate, and it seemed as if my whole life would end. I was grounded for two more months anyways, so I missed the rock shows and a lot of the taunting was directed at my best friend, Meagan. I kind of was lucky in that way, being hidden and locked up like a fugitive, because I missed a lot of the faces and voices mocking me. I didn’t have sex again for 2 and a half years after that it was so good.

My mother never knew ANY of this, and still knows only one time that I jumped out, ever. And I was 17. EN, my ridiculous boyfriend, was seen sitting out on the corner diagonal from my house and my mother noticed him. Later on, she heard the scratch of my feet against the side of the house, and went into my room shortly thereafter. Whenever I snuck out, I always came in at the point right before my dad got into the shower (5 am). This time my door was open and I knew I was fucked. My mother furiously came pouncing into my room, and demanded that I spend the rest of the day and afternoon picking weeds in the garden since I had “kept her up all night worrying”. This was the summer, so I didn’t have school to save me. So I picked my weeds and assured her over and over again it was literally the first time ever, and probably made up some accentuating excuse lies to make that entirely possible. In a tantrum I also cut chunks out of my hair because I was so angry my world had been shut, the door had been closed. To this day she still knows nothing else.

The result of that was that my parents then bolted my windows shut so that I could not get out, so my sneaking out ended for a time. Even when my parents went to Colorado and I pleaded with my big brother to just let me walk out the back door and not “sneak out” he would not let me. I was grounded for another 3 months then, and life just got more and more screwed up the more caged I was.

Later on that year I got into a fight with my mother that was a result of some discussion of the dishes not being done right. A pot had been found to have a food particle on it, and she flipped. Me, being sick of fighting about the dishes and always doing them (literally I have friends to attest to the fact that 8 out of 10 times when someone called me I would be doing the dishes). She would pull the same routine with the dishes that she did with my room…one dish dirty, you now wash every dish in the house by hand, the china cabinets everywhere. At this point I was 18 and had had enough, so I moved out into my first apartment second semester of my senior year. My mother was the office manager of this high school so this was more ballsy and messed up than you can imagine. The rest of that year were threats sent to me in note form about me not being able to graduate because of absences (at this point I was a pot smoking maniac and living with a drug dealer not even in the same town as I went to school in). Of course she wouldn’t let herself get further humiliated by allowing her daughter to fail, so she got the waiver, went to my graduation, barely said hello. No congrats were handed over, and unlike my older brother and sister behind me, she never got a picture of me getting my diploma, no dinners were had, no presents were given until months and months later.

I lied to my parents because there was no other way for me to survive. As a result I learned how to do it not only effectively, but almost exclusively with those in positions of power. I still have issues opening up to people who I feel have some power over me because it makes me feel vulnerable and like someone has the power to rip my life away from me again. The barricades are still there, a bit crumbled. And although I certainly take no pride in lying to anyone anymore, I have lied to bosses. I lied to my voice teacher today too, to take care of some shit. Sean is probably the only person to call me on it directly, and this whole discourse is a result of the conversation we had this morning. I suppose if I didn’t feel like I would have been penalized or ignored or left in the past, I never would have told any lies at all.

But it was my mother who taught me that. And you know what? When I was sick in the hospital and dying, I was so angry I had had literally 2 months of my life in complete freedom, and I was happy that I had had my secret life, my second life, because at least I got to live a little bit.