I also liked it because men do not ever try on clothes. They simply pick up a polo shirt, measure it roughly against their torsos, and throw it over their shoulders like they just chopped down a tree. I had zero tasks most days, yet I received the same $6.50 an hour as the poor saps endlessly folding silky camisoles at Banana Republic.

But, of course, I also had a mandatory name tag, so customers would often ask me where I was from.

“Do you like it better here?” one older customer asked, after I told him I was from Russia.

“Uh, sure,” I said. “I mean, I was really young when I left.”

“Well, it must be nice,” he said, “having all this freedom.”

“All this freedom” is something we heard a lot. Aren’t you enjoying all this freedom? Texans felt they had given us something that was so dear to them—freedom—and seemed hurt it was not more transformational for us, that we were not like snow-people whose icy exteriors melted away at the first bite of hot, nourishing freedom. But more often than not, people who are expected to feel persistently grateful instead wind up feeling subtly inferior.

There was another element to it. Though my Scandinavian mother could always pass for an average white American, my father looks like Saddam Hussein, and perhaps as a result I, too, don’t blend in perfectly with most of the people I grew up around. A friend of mine says this is because a certain stratum of upper-class, white Texans look “like pilgrims,” and she’s not entirely wrong. The popular girls at my high school looked like they had been born to a hardy germ line of Bavarian pioneers, then lightly sandblasted by scorching winds to a rugged perfection. I’m blond, but that’s about where the similarities end. My classmates said I looked like a mouse, or, on my better days, a turtle. As a Brooklynite makeup artist once informed me before an early-morning TV appearance, “You have vary exahtic featchas.” Whatever physical differences actually existed between me and my classmates only magnified the fact that I was already considered too nerdy and too foreign to date.

At the clothing store where I had my summer job, the workload at one point became so minimal that anarchy took hold. One time, all the boys emptied an entire canister of air freshener in the bathroom, clouding the place with a synthetic lavender scent that stung our eyes.

Despite their antics, I began to notice one of the boys in particular. “Brad” had gone to a different high school than mine. He had acne, which—it feels good to say now—I was willing to overlook. He was the “funny guy,” though the only funny thing I can remember him doing is the dancing monkey scene from Zoolander.