Ana was from a Bulgarian-Muslim family, and though she and her parents weren’t observant, her dark complexion marked her as “other,” especially in the new Age of Terror. She told me her name was a small protection because it didn’t sound foreign. On her birth certificate, it was actually spelt “Aana,” from ءانآ, which meant “moments” or “hours of the night.” We used to joke Hours of the Night would be the name of our debut album, though we never got around to forming the band. She was always very guarded about the hate hurled her way, or the fear she endured because of it. The few times I asked her about it she said, “I’d prefer not to talk about it.” And so we didn’t.

We were the only two people from our year accepted into the specialized drama program at Canterbury High School. I sometimes think they let me in out of sympathy. The braces, the acne, the flamboyant blouses from the Salvation Army — where else did I stand half a chance? To arrive in time for the morning bell, we had to wake at dawn and take an hour and a half’s worth of public transit. We spent a lot of our adolescence on city buses, lost in a playlist or a book, watching the same houses blur past day after day and noting all the subtle changes that accrued over time — a lawn left overgrown and then cut the next morning, shutters painted a new colour, Christmas lights hung and taken down. Most nights we stayed late after school to rehearse, sometimes until ten o’ clock at night, and we’d ride the three buses back through the dark, nodding off to sleep.

When we weren’t in rehearsals we lived in each other’s basements, watching horror films, the genre that offered the most faithful portraiture of suburban adolescence. I came to realize the thing that marked American horror films was how they made pornographic the moment of rupture between self and person: a teenager’s lingering moment of disbelief of having been run through by a chainsaw, a decapitated head that blinks before sliding off from its neck, a man looking down at his own disembowelment. In the winter of grade nine we watched Alien, drinking teeth-numbing electric-blue coolers. As a scientist looked down at himself to see alien spawn burst forth from his stomach, I startled with the recognition of a terror I had lived with since childhood. The same terror I had recognized in those bodies falling from the World Trade Center. It was the terror of the liminality between being a person and being a body, that threshold space of being a person beholding the body I was about to become.