It was mid 2008, I had turned 18 the last week of May thanks to being enrolled late and not speaking a lick of English when I got here in the 2nd grade. We had all the songs we downloaded from Limewire that our hearts could desire cued up on Windows Media Player and bumped to them as we danced—more like moshed—around my best friend’s room head-banging to My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.
I had streaks of red in my hair and I couldn’t find any skirts or dresses longer than mid-thigh in my size because I was half a foot taller than all of the girls in my class and about three bra sizes bigger. Nothing seemed to fit because it all hugged me too tightly, and I wasn’t allowed to walk out of my mom’s house without an obscenely outdated wool cardigan that made me look like I was going in to a diner for an earlybird senior citizen special.
School was out for the summer and I had next to nothing left to do before we rushed into our senior year. I was a bookworm and had read all of the assigned summer reading books for fun in my spare time already and I didn’t have much to do other than waste my time and the time of my friends’ older siblings.