• Watching a movie and falling asleep on Gene’s shoulder while drooling on his track zip-up…

• Yeah. The last one.

Going to see Gene involves a thorough washing of all the parts of my body that touch him. I, for one, like my smells, but I can understand why others might prefer Fresh Ocean Breeze to Cham-Hasn’t-Washed-Her-Armpits-Since-Her-Eight-Mile-Run Breeze. When the cleaning ritual is complete, I go to my room/mini-universe, where the walls are painted black and a projector casts stars all over the ceiling, my bed, and the floor. With my best outfit on (leggings), I add a little mousse to my hair. It takes the frizzies from brainwashed misfits to rebellious corkscrews with excellent personalities. Even though I spend a fair amount of time in the mirror, I think what I really want is the sort of beauty that has nothing to do with what I look like: beauty that’s always there, even if no one’s around to see it.

Downstairs, all the lights are on in the kitchen. I hurriedly take a mint from the drawer full of things that aren’t mine and keep an eye out for my parents. The counters suggest that Mom was in the middle of making dinner—a box of rice, a pan half filled with water in the sink. Cooking was my dad’s domain before Mom took it over. At first I tried to get her to play Elvis in the morning and whip up pancakes for dinner, but it didn’t feel like home when it was forced.

“Hey,” I call, pulling open the sliding door that separates my parents’ part of the house from all the other parts. “I’m going to Gene’s!”

I used to ask them before I went places, but they kept saying no, so now I just offer my plans up as facts. Or prophecies.

“Wait,” my mom yells. Her voice is muffled by a closed door and whatever else separates us that we can’t see. “Come here, Cham.”

I drag myself down the hall, which is lined with proof of all my awkward stages: fifth grade with the four-braid situation; seventh grade with the braces so big you could pretty much straighten a leg; and freshman year of high school, where I basically look like I do now except I hadn’t mastered my Gill School uniform yet, so I had it buttoned up to my lower lip. Suddenly it smells so strongly of pee I have to breathe through my mouth.

“I was just saying that I’m going to Gene’s,” I say again, my voice sounding nasally as I pause outside the bathroom, where my mom’s bright yellow bucket of cleaning supplies waits. I think she and the bucket are in a codependent relationship, but I guess the lavender-tinged-bleach smell isn’t the worst thing to have seeped into our lives over the past few years. My mom opens the bathroom door, fully exposing my dad on the toilet: pants down, toilet paper in hand, everything private decidedly un-private.