He did not want Liev to go. If he did, we would be living as a normal family and might be forced to function as such. I suspected that if Liev were not there, Daddy would have to help me come to terms with my mother’s nervous breakdown, maybe even help her. Ostensibly, the lodger’s purpose was to try to distract me from the disintegration of my mother. In retrospect I think I was supposed to entertain him too. And I did.

We painted together. We wrote plays. He took me to the movies. He dropped me off at summer theater camp and picked me up at the end of the day. Of course eyebrows were raised at the end-of-course meeting, which neither my mother, nor my father, nor Liev deigned to attend. And that infuriated the teachers and the other parents because they correctly suspected that Mommy, Daddy, and Liev felt there was nothing the teachers could tell them about me that they didn’t already know. And if there was something—well then it was not something they cared to find out. They knew that there were directors, actors, and writers at my father’s get-togethers, people who could pluck any one of them out of their day jobs at junior-high theater camp and into the big time.

If Mom, Dad, or Liev had attended, they would have learned that I was well behaved if somewhat detached. That I had no friends, but did not seem unduly concerned about it. That I did tend to linger outside the staff room during lunch hour, seeking to continue discussions that had ended in morning class. That I could not eat in the cafeteria because I hated watching other children chew, but that I snuck my lunch out onto the theater stage and crouched in a corner behind the red curtains. And that I had cried and cried when I was chosen to play Puck, not Titania. “No, no, I’m not mischievous. Fuck you, motherfuckers, how’s that for gamine? I want to be the Queen because I am the Queen and if you can’t see that I fear for my place in the world.”

A couple of evenings after theater camp, Liev and I watched The Breakfast Club on tape. I liked it, despite the things I didn’t understand. When I was twelve, teen films felt like a language I could read immaculately from the page, without even knowing what the words meant. Part of the reason that film appealed to me so much was that I knew I was too young for it. Liev was only twenty-five. He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss—the one that is happening as you feel it.