Camgirl Read online

  “Your mother’s in the hospital. She overdosed on Valium.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was in a coma for three days. She’s awake now.”

  “A what?”

  “A coma. She’s awake. They didn’t call me until now.”

  “Are you gonna go there?”

  “Her flight back is Tuesday, by the time I got there…”

  “Okay.”

  My parents had little in common, but trying to kill them-selves was really the glue that held our family together.

  After my dad hung up, I turned to my sister. “Mom was in a coma for three days, apparently, but now she’s awake.”

  “A coma? Why?”

  “She took too much Valium.”

  “Oh.”

  We stood in silence for a moment.

  “Should we text her?” Lucy ventured.

  “You can.”

  “She might get mad at us. If she knows we know.”

  “So don’t text her then.”

  My parents slept in separate bedrooms, led separate lives, and had separate interests, which left Lucy and I separate from them too. They gave my sister and I all the freedom we could ever desire, and then some. In the face of neglect, I became a hyperactive monster who sparred with principals and stirred up drama. My sister, on the other hand, became sullen and sarcastic. Often, we would find ourselves in a seemingly empty house, my mother locked away in “her tower” (as my father called the top-floor master suite) and my father locked away in “his office” (as my mom called his basement-level bedroom). We talked to each through an intercom system on the phone.

  My mom rang down.

  “What are you girls doing?”

  “Watching Daria,” my sister answered, munching on chips.

  “You’ve been watching TV all day, go do something else.”

  “Okay.” Lucy hung up the phone and unmuted the TV. My mom called back a moment later.

  “Are you still watching TV?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Well, watch TV until your eyes bleed then. I don’t care.”

  “Okay, thanks. Bye.” My sister hung up the phone.

  As a family, we didn’t do much together. When my dad was in town, he made us eat dinner in a charade of togetherness. When he was working, my mom bought us takeout and we ate silently in front of the television. My parents showed one another little to no physical affection. I only saw them kiss once, and that was after my sister and I forced them by chanting “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” from the back seat of the car. It took fifteen minutes of nonstop screaming before we got so much as a peck.

  Twice a month, we’d make time for family game night. We played two games. The first was called “criticize the show/commercial/news broadcast.” In that game, my mom would shriek any time she noticed a bad wig or foundation that didn’t match the actor’s neck or if someone had accidentally cast an ugly person in a sitcom. My dad pointed out any time the lighting equipment reflected in someone’s pupil or when a night scene was obviously shot in the day with a bad filter. My sister and I tried to beat them to the punch, sometimes pretending we could see a light even when we couldn’t.

  The other game was called “go into the bathroom and discuss Mom’s alcoholism.” I’m not really sure why these conversations always took place in the bathroom, but I think it’s because my dad wanted a place where we were all trapped and couldn’t leave. After any particularly bad episode, my sister, mother, and I preferred to sweep up the glass, apologize to the cops, pay some sort of civic fine, and spend the next seventeen days refusing to make eye contact. Then my dad would come home, discover that a $5,000 piece of art had been donated to the city dump and summon us to The Lavatory for A Conference. They all went something like:

  “Your mother needs to go to rehab.”

  My sister and I would mumble in agreement.

  “We need to support her while she gets better.”

  My sister and I would roll our eyes at the concept of familial support.

  “She’s sick. You understand that, right?”

  We’d nod.

  “Marilyn, CAN YOU PLEASE TALK TO YOUR CHILDREN?”

  My mother would raise her head up halfway from where she was seated on the toilet lid, still in the nightgown she’d been wearing for days. She’d push her hair behind her ears, place her hands in prayer pose.

  “Hmm? Yes. I really just need to recenter myself.”

  While my mom did attend rehab a couple times, and even said once that she “had an allergy to alcohol,” she never committed to sobriety. She did manage, however, to get better at hiding her drinking from my father by only doing it while he was out of town for work. Without proper adult supervision, she was free to wreak havoc on our house. And on our social lives. Like the time I came home with some friends and she was “doing yoga” in the living room wearing only sheer tights and a bra.

  “Come join me, girls,” she slurred, breathlessly. She was on her back, her legs spread open wide, sheer polyester the only thing between my friends’ eyes and my mom’s vagina.

  “Legs up the wall is really good for you, really important…inverts your energy.”

  Sometimes these episodes would end with me or my sister calling the cops, but only when my mother was threatening to kill herself or had decided that driving was a good idea.

  I enjoyed when the cops came. They were so very concerned for our wellbeing. Since my sister didn’t like to talk to them, I naturally became the center of attention.

  “Does your mother ever hit you?”

  “Well…”

  “Isa!” my sister would hiss.

  “No. She doesn’t.”

  “Does she drink often?”

  “Well, she’s an alcoholic,” I’d state, matter-of-factly. “So yes.”

  After the cops left, convinced that my mother was stable and in fact only moderately drunk, she would turn on us.

  “So help me God…”

  “Mom, we’re sorry—we were scared!” Lucy would try explaining.

  “Bullshit. You’re a liar. Out to ruin my life.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “Go tattle to your father, why don’t you?” She’d stumble upstairs to her room. “I know you both love him best. But where is he? Huh? Where is he?”

  “Mom…”

  “Galavanting around with his whores—that’s where. I’m raising you. This is the thanks I get?” She’d slam her door and turn the lock violently.

  “I don’t know why you even bother talking to her,” I’d tell Lucy. “You’re wasting your time.”

  If we didn’t call the cops, we’d call whomever her best friend was at the time, who would rush over quickly and try to shelter us.

  “Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll take care of everything,” the best friend would croon.

  I’d repeat my mantra: “She’s an alcoholic. You can’t fix anything. Just make sure she doesn’t die.”

  “There’s no need to be dramatic,” the best friend always assured us, tapping gently on my mother’s door. “Marilyn, Marilyn can you open up? It’s me.”

  “She said she has razor blades,” Lucy would offer helpfully.

  After a binge, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days, until she’d suddenly appear downstairs, dressed, made-up, asking us why Rosa hadn’t vacuumed the living room, and why no one had brought in her package from Neiman Marcus. And then she’d disown whatever friend we had brought in to help her.

  “Oh, Nancy?” she’d say, when asked why we never saw her friend anymore. “She turned out to be a raging bitch. They all do.”

  When my mother was drunk, I couldn’t leave because I was terrified that she would die, and I couldn’t really stay because I was terrified that she would accidentally kill us. When I was younger, I would hide with my si
ster under her loft bed and we’d play pretend games with our stuffed animals. Neither of us really wanted to play, but we’d move the animals around and make them talk to each other, acting like we weren’t straining to hear my mother’s footsteps as she wandered drunkenly around the house.

  “What’s your bear do?”

  “He’s an astronaut.”

  “Okay, mine is the scientist, let’s say.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hi, Mr. Bear. Please, let’s go to Pluto.”

  “He wouldn’t go to Pluto.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s a stupid planet.”

  I was leading two lives. On the one hand, I was a girl whose parents knew celebrities and who got to visit film sets. I flew first class to Europe and gave my friends autographed Destiny’s Child posters for their birthdays. On the other hand, I was a girl whose parents were so crippled by their own mental illnesses that they nearly abandoned her. I felt these two halves of myself begin to polarize. There was the me that wanted to be rich and glamorous like my parents, and there was the me that wanted to murder my family and burn down the world.

  Since love and attention from my parents were sporadic and infrequent gifts, I learned to seek them elsewhere. Without a sense of belonging even in my own family, the role of outcast came naturally, and I began to revel in the opportunities it presented. If I was going to be a weird girl with a tragic family, I was going to be the weirdest girl with the most tragic family.

  That was, after all, a great way to get attention.

  Girls Chase Boys

  Henceforth I walk the Wiccan path,” I chanted. “I dedicate myself to you, Mother Goddess, and you, Father God.” I raised the candle I had lit, letting the burning wax run down my hands. What was dedication if not pain, after all?

  I needed to stand out, be different, turn heads when I walked down the hallway. The easiest way to do this, it seemed, was to make sure I was the strangest girl in middle school. At age twelve, I decided this meant I should appropriate a pagan religion I didn’t understand at all, and so I dove headfirst into my Wiccan phase. I was obsessed with the sacred feminine and cast spells on girls who looked at me weirdly during recess. My regular outfits consisted of long, black, flowy skirts and bracelets stacked up to my elbow.

  “I don’t go to church, I’m a witch,” I announced to my pre-algebra class. “I wouldn’t want to get burned at the stake or anything.”

  Kids snickered. I smirked. They’d pay for that. I had an entire book of revenge spells. Most people, however, didn’t mind. In Boulder, the whole witchy thing was almost cool. There was a shop downtown that sold tarot cards, and there was a palm reader at the farmer’s market. My friend Megan’s mom went to a reiki healer and handed me pieces of rose quartz when I had a cold.

  After sixth grade, however, things changed when my dad decided to move us to Italy.

  “To learn Italian,” he explained.

  “But we know enough Italian,” my sister protested.

  “You girls need to be fluent. I want you to be able to live there when you’re older.”

  To ease our transition to a new country, he rented us a massive villa replete with silk Victorian couches we weren’t allowed to touch or even breathe near. The first year, we attended an American private school where my grandmother worked as a librarian and administrator. It was the same school my dad had attended as a child, and all the other students were related to famous artists or shoe designers. When we went to the liquor store, I saw their last names emblazoned in gold on bottles of eighty-euro Chianti.

  In Boulder, I was the weird rich girl with famous parents and too many bracelets. In Italy, I was the weird, not-rich girl whose family had no legacy and who didn’t understand how to dress. I tried at first to be the same, loud, obnoxious person I was back home.

  “Do you guys like Marilyn Manson? My dad did a music video for him, actually. The one, you know, where there are all those organs in the jars?”

  A beautiful redhead named Kendra blinked at me.

  Her friend Shelby answered, “Isn’t he that super creepy guy with the weird face?”

  “Well, I mean, he’s not creepy. He just understands…the darkness.”

  Kendra laughed. “What darkness?”

  “You know, like, the darker side of life?”

  “Yeah, well, he seems creepy to me.”

  “Super creepy,” Shelby agreed. “Plus, he kind of looks like a woman.”

  I began to realize that being different might not be the best way to get attention in Italy. This problem was compounded by the fact that things were happening. To my body, specifically. I was growing boobs, and I got a period. I assumed going through puberty meant crippling shame and embarrassment forever. My mom wouldn’t let me shave my legs as early as the other girls, so I had to pretend to shave my legs and try to keep them covered as much as possible. Once when I was sitting in class, Shelby ran her hand up my calf.

  “Oh my God. Your legs are so smooth,” she gushed. “Kendra, come feel this!”

  Kendra ran her hand up my hairy leg. “Oh yes, so smooth. What brand razor do you use?”

  “Gil-leet,” I explained, mispronouncing the name I had read off my dad’s razor on the bathroom sink that morning.

  “Ohhhh, never heard of it.” Shelby smiled. “Must be fancy.”

  It took me a full minute to realize they had been making fun of me.

  Fortunately, with my leg hair also came a growing sense of purpose. I began to realize that being a woman meant I had a type of power.

  This realization started with a boy named Mike Parson.

  One afternoon, I was sitting in the Italian class for expats who still spoke Italian at a toddler level. The teacher had left the room, instructing us to “memorize your vocab,” which meant we were all gossiping loudly about how Kendra was going to the dance with Paolo. Mike, an eighth grader with green eyes and an inappropriate sense of humor, was sitting in the teacher’s office chair, spinning in circles and whacking desks with a ruler.

  All of a sudden, he stopped the chair mid-spin and stared right at me. I looked down at my desk. Mike was cool. He was the funny guy everyone liked. Plus, he was a year older, which in middle school years is basically a decade. I didn’t talk to Mike. I didn’t even talk about Mike. Mike rolled his chair right up to me.

  He snapped the ruler down on my desk. “Hey, Isa.”

  I looked up.

  “Do you want to go out with me?”

  I can’t remember what went through my brain at that point because I actually blacked out. My brain just decided to stop functioning. Since my brain wasn’t functioning, my mouth wasn’t either. What I was able to do, however, was vigorously shake my head “no.”

  “Are you serious?” Mike rolled the chair back a few feet and looked me up and down.

  My head nodded, the only part of me capable of movement. Mike threw the ruler down on the floor. “Fuck this,” he muttered under his breath, rolling his chair back to the front of the classroom.

  “But I didn’t even want to say no!” I sobbed to my mom that night, my snot soaking through her silk night slip.

  “It’s okay if you’re not ready to date,” my mom said. “Men will always want women like us. We can’t say yes to all of them.”

  In the weeks that followed, I tried to assess what had happened. Mike Parson liked me. How was that even possible? No one had told me he had a crush on me. I had barely even talked to him. I didn’t consider myself pretty, and I knew I didn’t dress as fashionably as the richer, trendier girls.

  Mike made sure I knew he was upset. When we passed each other in the hallways he would let out a loud sigh or kick the ground. Once, as I averted my eyes from him, he bashed his head against the metal lockers while exclaiming “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. Everyone looked at him. Everyone looked at me.
I had done this to him. I had broken him.

  I felt guilty, sure. But even more deeply, I felt a tinge of excitement.

  I had done this to him.

  Mike began dating my friend Allie and overnight, Allie became a celebrity. She was only in sixth grade, but she was dating Mike Parson.

  “Yeah, but he asked me out first,” I told my friend Natalie.

  “Sure he did.”

  “No, really.”

  “Then why aren’t you dating him?”

  I didn’t answer. I had made Mike slam his face into a locker. I was the one he wanted first. I was supposed to be the girl riding on the back of Mike’s Vespa after school. (In Italy you can drive Vespas at fourteen, for some reason. Which is probably why so many people die on Vespas.)

  I may not have been dating Mike, but I now had a taste for power and attention that ran even deeper than having cool parents or being a dark, brooding witch. I could control another person. I could make another person feel heartbreak. Which meant I could also make another person feel love. It was the same rush of attention I felt when I announced that I was a witch, but way more validating.

  As I watched Allie and Mike make out, pressed against the frosted glass of the library window, I turned to Natalie.

  “I’m going to get a boyfriend.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t picked him.”

  “You can’t just pick a boyfriend. Doesn’t he have to like you?”

  “I’ll make him like me.”

  It was decided. It was time to grow up.

  The following semester, my family moved back to Boulder, and I began a new school—and a new experiment. I was going to pick a boy I wanted to date, and I was going to make him date me. I was going to feel powerful again.

  I picked a target: a shy boy named Nathaniel. He had a twin brother who was much louder, more boisterous, and more popular. I figured Nathaniel would be an easy target.