georgia to texas: the summer of 2003

the move from warner robins, ga to helotes, tx was the worst of them all.

i finished writing my second novel that summer, my mother's fujitsu plugged into "the purple box" so that i could write as we drove west. i wrapped headphones around my ears, and listened to the angriest music my mother would allow, trying to tap in and tune out as i killed my heroine's love interest on a winding back road, introduced ghosts and pirates and unicorns that fulfilled prophecies. it was god awful, but i still have the floppy disks brimming with multiple, minutely different drafts.

that summer, i turned fourteen. i spent most of the day strung out on a mattress in my grandmother's living room, my makeshift bedroom until we had walls farther south. i stuffed myself with ritz crackers and dr. pepper. a laptop kept me company, my single connection backwards, my virtual highway east. it was a nice computer, considering the time, and my grandfather was kind enough to let me borrow it for weeks on end, even though he was writing another book and probably needed the mobility more than i needed to rebel against my parents' choices.

i had my first brush with danger that august -- a stranger in a chat room masquerading as an acquaintance, a man desperate to know my full name, my address, my phone number, my parents' names, a/s/l. i gave him nothing but a nickname, parading through cyberspace with a tolkien-inspired screen-name, but he got closer and closer to my trust, inching ever nearer in the way that predators (even unintentional ones) always do. i think he thought he could save me from the horrors of my mind, but no one could, not even me.

theatre camp was supposed to be the final crossing into my new life. two weeks in the mountains of montana, learning a new show with 120 other hand-selected students from across the country. we were talented, they said, full of potential. all i felt was full of blood, toxic red that leaked from me and stained my skin. i felt that i carried my pain to the fire-scorched forests, so far removed from the entanglements of leaving and yet so immersed in them that i thought they would never leave me.

that move was a kind of trauma that i previously imagined myself immune to. was it my age? was it that my father's mother had died in georgia, and i felt wrong being away from the remains of her? was it the house in kathleen, blue and perfect and the one i chose for us before my parents had even brushed the curb with our weathered tires? was it all that had happened in that bedroom, or the way my demons finally emerged, fully-fleshed and taunting, in the bathroom mirror i shared with a sister who couldn't see them?

was it all in the timing, or did any of that matter at all?