As you learned in Vol 15, I smoked. Rothmans Blue. Then a variety of Canadian Export A cigarettes. Marlboro Lights, occasionally. 

 

    I bought a tiny plastic baby with a Mohawk on a chain to hang in my pierced ear. I got a second hole in my left ear to join the first. 

 

    And I planned my return to Brussels. Obie was retiring and taking the family to San Diego. No matter, I was going to return and stay with Alex in his super-cool attic bedroom, where we could look at his small collection of Italian pornography and clandestinely exhale cigarette smoke directly into a hole in the chimney, thanks to a removable metal plug in the wall. 

 

    I scanned the St. Petersburg Times travel section every Sunday for deals to Europe. A Pan Am sale offered a $400 roundtrip that included the spring-break window. I was thrilled. I had nearly that much saved, thanks first to my Wendy’s job, which did not last long, and the after-school job that saw me through the rest of high school, washing dishes at Schnikel-Fritz, a goofy German deli, where I was right at home. 

 

    Dora hardly shared my excitement. Go back to that horrible environment where you picked up smoking, this time without your father? No siree. What? But I made enough for the ticket! If Pan Am will take my money, if my passport will get me into Belgium, doesn’t that trump your quaint parental restriction? Apparently not. 

 

    As frustrating as it was, I couldn’t blame her. I was 16. I was careening. That straight-A report card of freshman year was not a promise of a responsible future, but merely an anomaly. How I had the nerve to push against expected, needed restraint stuns me today. Was it courage? Was it hubris? I’ll blame the hormonal hurricane of adolescence, and agree that teenagers should be corralled on farms till they mature into adults. 

 

    With the Brussels trip out of the question, nothing to lose, I came out to Alex by mail. I was a little too dramatic, telling him that I’d been paying attention to his homophobia, to his – possibly fictitious – tale of once roughing up a gay kid. His reply was, essentially, that I should calm down, which was appropriate advice. It was also his last reply. 

 

    But I wasn’t done coming out. I told Chris. Some pals also read my “journal” while waiting in my room for me to shower ahead of an evening out. Thankfully, they seemed to find my new, exotic trait to be a possible asset to our pseudo-edgy clique. 

 

    I came out to someone else junior year: Taylor. I thought I was coming out to a boy who liked to wear makeup. That’s the way the Star Hits classified ad read.  

 

    A kid in my gym class bought a subscription to Star Hits, one of the few teen music mags, to read about Generation X, Billy Idol’s band. Once Billy broke the band to pursue his more lucrative solo career, my classmate lost interest. Instead, he would just give them to me. Pre-Internet, a magazine with a classified section was a perfectly legitimate way to connect. 

 

    That’s where I spotted Taylor. Taylor was actually the persona; Linda was the girl. Boy who wears makeup? Nah. Linda’s story was that the ad was placed by a scorned boyfriend, and Taylor was a nickname inherited from her grandfather. Was there a scorned boyfriend? I don’t know. Was Taylor from Gramps or Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor? I don’t know. It didn’t matter, either. I called her Taylor and we exchanged a couple letters a month. Hers were always remarkable, if only for how she decorated her envelopes, each a work of art. She lived in Indianapolis and was the most creative person I knew. 

 

    Without asking my mother, I bought a ticket on American Airlines for a week in summertime. “It was a sale. I had to act fast.” “What? I’m going to need to speak to this girl’s mother.” Dora tried going through the motions, but, oh, the exhaustion of raising a teenager. Just go. And go I did. Via Nashville.