When my family moves, things calm down in my head. I’m increasingly able to convince myself that no one will ever find out. Ever. No one saw. No one can read my thoughts. Fiset is six feet underground, and I’m still here, out in the big wide world, biding my time in a packed, stifling classroom. The teacher is soldiering on with her explanation of the importance of budgeting. Since every one of her students is convinced they’re going to be millionaires, she doesn’t make much headway. Everything is as it should be. At that very moment, not a single person is thinking about me. No one suspects me. “How much does a smoker, who smokes one pack a day at $7.95 each, spend on cigarettes in a year? What else could that person do with that amount of money?” This teacher is after my own heart.

The thing about secrets is they wear you down. I’d never really understood when people described something as a “heavy weight to bear.” It’s not that I feel guilty, but it’s hard not being able to brag about it to anyone. So I do my best to forget the whole thing.

My teenage years have been mostly smooth sailing up to now. Like a lot of people my age, I have no doubt that I am the very centre of the universe, and no one else has anything better to do than spy on my every word and action, judge my appearance, and talk behind my back. My rational mind may understand that the world doesn’t work that way, but this exaggerated sense of my own importance will take years to fade. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

My parents are the only people I still spend time with who remember what I was like at that age — people whose blind love and fundamental goodness prevents them from seeing the perfectly ordinary evil brewing in their daughter. This is my favourite explanation. There’s another, simpler one, though: I’m good at hiding who I really am. It’s one of my greatest strengths, one I’ve been perfecting since I was a child. For example, even today my dad has no idea that his lawn mower fell prey to an act of sabotage. With all the insight of a ten-year-old, I was violently opposed to the biweekly massacre of the wildflowers that grew on our lawn. They’d worked so hard to grow back, overcoming the colonizing grass and the barbecue, pollution, and adversity of their ecosystem. I wouldn’t have phrased it quite like that back then, of course, but I was already driven by the same rage and feelings of powerlessness as today.