Mario likes that I’m willing to try it all, that I’m willing to go there, that I am not a barrier to whatever he wants. You’re not like other girls, he says, and I wind the words tight around me, a cape. The world is full of other girls—shiny-haired, giggle-glowing, simultaneously pure and sex-enthralled, groups of them, worlds of them, walking in community, writhing under club lights, running through parks. But if he says he doesn’t like other girls, if I am not an “other girl,” he will be mine, not theirs.

Except that I know deep down that I am other girls. They spin in me and around me. I am of them: my coworker who has been wearing the same lipstick shade, Barely Legal, every day since some guy leaned over the counter and complimented her on the color. My mother who buys and buys, sure she hasn’t found the right cream the right needle the right dress to win a man back, so she keeps trying. She keeps buying. Sasha who is no longer my best friend, because her boyfriend told her he thought she should dress more like me (clarified: more sexy) and so she realized I was not an other girl to him or that she was not a special girl, a chosen girl, or that all the categories collapse at the behest of the men who make them and that it is just easier to pretend that we have any control in the first place. Control is pushing me away.

Mario has no idea. He has no idea the time and energy I spend trying to hide all this from him. Instead of telling him, I tell myself: Do it all. Never say no. No is for other girls.

I met Mario in rehab, my first one. I wasn’t really addicted, I still don’t think, even though yeah, yeah, I know. It was just coke and it wasn’t even every day but I’d lost my office job when I failed a drug test and my mother was relentless and finally I said okay, I can afford to check out for twenty-eight days if it will get you off my back. It was a religious place, twelve steps, all that. The staff didn’t really care. They were making money. I never talked.