The summer before eighth grade—the summer after mom married the boyfriend who’d moved in six years before—I’d escaped their house to live with my dad, his third wife, and her daughter. 

Toward the end of my ninth-grade year, he took a job in California and they announced they would be moving without children. My stepsister would stay in the house she’d always lived in, and her father would move back in. I would go back to mom’s house. 

Though my trajectory had been from frying pan to fire, everything in me railed against returning to that pan. The heat would be hotter, the kitchen smaller, my friends hundreds of miles away.

I’d been the character among those friends: the jester, the friendly weirdo, the one with the good stories, the harmless freak among the preppies. 

Tenth grade was a fresh starting line on a new track in my old town. High school was rich with clubs and cliques and it was easy to find the kids whose peculiarities more or less complemented mine. Art nerds. Drama nerds. Music nerds. Queer kids; punks, Deadheads, and new-wavers. We collected each other, collected quirks, collected and recounted embroidered, tasseled, jewel-encrusted stories.

A new friend from the drama club introduced me to a friend she’d gone to junior high with.

Laura was a day student at the bohemian boarding school I’d have given my eyeteeth to attend. The Preppy Handbook’s writeup made it sound like an uncivilized jungle populated by longhaired pot-smoking freaks—just where I knew I belonged. I wanted what she had.

She was cosmopolitan, neurotic, and accident-prone in ways that looked like sophistication to my fifteen-year-old eyes; every misadventure made a damn good story after the scabs had healed.

Laura was adopted, too. She didn’t fit into her family any better than I fit into mine. She pushed at the walls of their conventional container with every pointy thing she could find. She was 16 when we met and already plotting to find her birth mother the minute she turned 18. 

The possibility of finding mine began taking shape in the reflected glow of my friend’s resolve. Claudia, my first stepmother, had told me when I was eight that I could look when I turned 18. Two years later, Ann Landers said I couldn’t. Here was Laura hollering, “Hold my beer!”

Oh, man. I couldn’t wait for her to find her mother! Ann Landers was wrong, finally.

At nine a.m. on her first day of legal adulthood, she called the adoption agency, which had been holding for 18 years a letter from her mother, who still lived in a neighboring town. They met within the week. Laura was bitterly disappointed to find her dull and conventional. She didn’t want anything to do with her beyond getting her father’s phone number.

Jacques, though—here was a character. Here was the bohemian she knew she was descended from: a hard-drinking, convention-loathing New York poet and raconteur. He was more out there than even she could have wished for.

Here was the motherlode of stories. Now we were talking.

He looked like her, talked like her, moved like her, thought like her, rhapsodized like her, drank like her. Here was where she came from, where she belonged. Here was all the love and understanding she’d been missing her entire life.

We all daydreamed—at 16, 17, 18—of being seduced by someone older, an artist, a dashing character, a deep well, a man of the world. Dreamt of being understood—and matched—in our uniqueness, our cleverness, our depth. Dreamt of outrageous glamor, of all the excellent stories we’d be able to recount.

Laura’s delight in being seen, loved, courted, bubbled over everything. Jacques said! Jacques did! Jacques gave me! He was the wildest, most romantic man any of us had ever hoped to meet. 

I’d been born with boho cred, in the Haight, in the small months leading up to the Summer of Love. My birthmother had been a painter, musician, poet. Those wisps of identity were vital to me but not enough to anchor my life. I needed more. Needed to know her story, hear her songs, see her paintings, see that I was as like her as Laura was like Jacques. I’d have to wait another year.  An eternal year, the time tempered by my attention to Laura’s unfolding story. Her story would carry me through.  

But, holy shit—she slept with him? Her biological father? 

Damn. 

In an instant she’d become, hands-down, the most hardcore badass, the most glamorous eccentric and the toughest cookie any of us knew. The punks had nothing on her.

Of course it didn’t last. Of course she was devastated. 

Ann Landers’ gavel crashed down again: I couldn’t search. 

Something like that could be out there waiting for me. I didn’t want to know.