Nevertheless, I embraced all of Johnny Depp’s roles, regardless of their critical reception: the Mad Hatter, Willy Wonka, Barnabas Collins, Sam from Benny and Joon, Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (whom I bought the perfect bucket hat for, and then took it a step further and purchased a bald cap online, blending it perfectly into my scalp. It was my greatest makeup feat to date). Each video was essentially a highlight reel of my favorite quotes, edited into a phantasmagoria of Johnny-Depptitude.

SAM: “How sick is she? Because, you know, it seems to me that, I mean, except for being a little mentally ill, she’s pretty normal.”

RAOUL DUKE: “Let’s get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape?”

WILLY WONKA: “Everything in this room is eatable. Even I’m eatable, but that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.”

JACK SPARROW: “Me, I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you want to watch out for.”

SAM: (Stabs a pair of dinner rolls with a pair of forks.) (Makes them dance.) (Like, performs an entire fucking dance number.)

If this seemed out of character for me, that’s because it was. I liked to draw attention to myself as much as I liked to draw dicks on my own face. This hobby started quite by accident. By the time I realized what I had gotten myself into—what I had become (a minor-league YouTube celebrity)—it had taken on a life of its own.

Maybe some lengthy, convenient exposition is necessary.

It all started on Halloween, my freshman year. I was Edward Scissorhands, and Willow (twelve years old at the time) was Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. With Mom and Dad’s help, our costumes and makeup were on fucking point. I had ultra-realistic fake scars on my face, my longish hair was moussed up into a gravity-defying mess, and I had, like, honest-to-Gozer scissors for hands! (I’d tell you how expensive my costume was, but then I would have to kill you with my bare scissorhands, because it was a shameful, ridiculous amount.) We got the costumes for Mom and Dad’s Halloween work party. The two of them were dressed as Morticia and Gomez Addams (The Addams Family), respectively, and they seemed as madly, macabrely in love with each other as their TV personas.

The Slevin family stole the show at the Memorial Hospital of Carbondale.

When we came home, Willow and I couldn’t get out of costume. The costumes were just too good to be shed like snake skin, discarded ritualistically, never to be seen again.

So we went trick-or-treating.