MIDDLE SCHOOL TIME! UGH, THE worst. Okay, so I turned twelve in September 1994. Being a teenybopper tween in this era was pret-ty dark. The cutest rock star, Kurt Cobain, shot himself in the head, and my friends and I were wildly interested in this. How could we not be? Murdering your life had officially gone pop! Courtney Love was reading Kurt’s suicide note over a loudspeaker on MTV. “I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE” posters were stocked alongside the usual Salt-N-Pepa and Madonna at Sam Goody at the mall. I bought one! Kurt was wearing green Converse One Star sneakers in the suicide photos, so I bought green Converse One Stars—and so did my friend Lauren. And then so did my friend Samara! That sort of thing. Kurt was dead, yes, but he was still dreamy: we all agreed on this. His blue eyes were just so pretty. And his chin-length hair on Nirvana: Unplugged? Omigod.
Zack and Kelly came down from my walls in the Kachina basement (Mark-Paul Gosselaar was starting to look all ’roided out, anyway—it was The College Years) and Kurt and Courtney went up. Not that I was home much. My squad and I convened nearly every day after school in my new best friend Shabd’s hot-pink bedroom, so painted after the feathers on the cover of the Garbage album she always had on repeat. We’d flip through Sassy and YM magazines and watch 120 Minutes and eat junk food from 7-Eleven. I was a big fan of Utz Salt‘n Vinegar potato chips and drastically less so of doing my homework. (Is this what ADHD is? I’ll never know!)
All we talked about were rock stars, rock stars, rock stars: it was, after all, what Rolling Stone has since called “Mainstream Alternative’s Greatest Year.” Lauren loved Dave Grohl and Beck; Shabd squealed about Michael Stipe, Billy Corgan, and Shannon Hoon. Samara got hot for Anthony Kiedis and Eddie Vedder; Sarah was into Perry Farrell and Scott Weiland. And me? I was all Courtney Love, all of the time. I loved her platinum hair; I loved her baby-doll clothes; I loved her music. I bought every magazine she was in—from Sassy (I had the Kurt and Courtney cover on my wall) to Spin to Rolling Stone. I read the profiles until I’d memorized them. She stimulated my brain. Every Courtney interview taught me thirty new things. She was so gossipy and funny—glamorous and a feminist! (I was getting into feminism, too—riot grrl and all that.) And her mother was a weirdo psychotherapist, too.
Shabd had been raised in some sort of . . . “community,” let’s say. Whatever it was, her family wasn’t in it anymore. Her mom had hair down to her waist and a sort of . . . New Age accent. The whole family was vegetarian, and they lived in a tiny house full of crystals and health food and . . . I don’t know. Driftwood! (Maybe not driftwood.) Anyway. I was so jealous of my friend. Her parents let her do anything she wanted to do—and Shabd wanted to do crazy things, like bleach her hair platinum and then dye Manic Panic stripes into it like a rainbow. I wasn’t even allowed to wear black eyeliner. I did anyway, but still.
Shabd’s dad had a long, brown beard and barely spoke. He took us to concerts! We were obsessed; we scoured the City Paper every week. The best shows were at a tiny DC club called the Black Cat. Shabd’s dad would stand in the back while we maneuvered to the stage: “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, please.” Mad squeaky. Shabd was literally four-eight and I was five feet, so people were nice. Well, until the mosh pit started—but we didn’t mind a little violence. The rougher things got, the more likely it was that bouncers would lift us up and out of there and plunk us down on the stage by the speakers and the amps. That’s how I saw L7—so close up that I thought a guitar neck might bash me in the face!
God, I just loved the feeling of being in that club! And Shabd and I knew a secret about the Black Cat: the bands had to exit through the front to get outside to their tour buses. So if you waited around in the club after the show—while the bartenders counted the money and the cleaning crews swept the floors—you could meet the rock stars! Normal adult fans didn’t get to just linger about, but tweens are very charming, you know. Work it while you can, kids.
We met so many people: Seven Year Bitch, Tripping Daisy, Collective Soul, the Presidents of the United States of America. Radiohead! Thom (we called him “Thom-with-an-H”) was cute, but it was the guitarist Jonny Greenwood we were really hot for. He was skinny and pale, with brown hair hanging in his eyes, long fingers, and terrible posture. We sat onstage and screamed every time he looked at us, which wasn’t too often (I think he was afraid). Then, after the show . . .
“WE LOVE YOU!” we screamed in unison, as we generally did. “CAN YOU SIGN OUR POSTERS? BWAHHHH!” They were very sweet. Shabd and I were still crying when we left the Black Cat.
If you’re young, you must go to as many shows as you can! You’ll never regret it. My friends and I saw the Lords of Acid (“Crablouse”), R.E.M. on their Monster tour, Smashing Pumpkins, Silverchair, the Cranberries on the Mall in DC. We cut school for that one and it turned into a riot—no, seriously! Shabd and I got jostled around until a nice cop pulled us out and drove us back to Bethesda in his squad car. We held hands and giggled in the backseat.
But my biggest rock-star day was at the HFStival, when I was thirteen. Anyone who was anyone in 1995 was playing this show. My friends and I squished to the front as usual—but this was RFK Stadium, not a club. The guys thrashing around by the stage were mental; we were holding on to the guardrail for our lives. Screaming for each other. Garbage was onstage; it was ninety trillion degrees, and I hadn’t been drinking water or anything, duh, because I was stuck in front of this stupid mosh pit. The bar was pressing so hard into my stomach that I finally blacked out.
Bouncers snatched me up and carried me to the infirmary backstage. The medics were wearing GERMS T-shirts—a nod to onetime Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear, who was playing the festival with his new band, the Foo Fighters. As a GERM checked me out, I peeked over his shoulder. Weren’t those . . . the Everclear dudes? Walking right by. That’s when I realized the GERMS station was set up between the dressing rooms and the main stage . . .
“You’re good to go,” the GERM told me.
“Can I rest here for a little while?” I said sweetly. I was wearing Shabd’s minuscule X-Girl hot pants, Urban Decay nail polish, ice-blue Hard Candy glittery eyeliner, and a Bikini Kill “YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH” T-shirt from Smash! in Georgetown. “I still don’t feel good.”
“Sure,” the medic said. “Don’t leave this cot, okay?” I nodded. And that’s what I did: stayed put, and observed the celebrities from a respectful distance.
“GWENNNN!” Just kidding. The second I saw Gwen Stefani, I levitated—seriously—and flew directly into her arms. No Doubt had just made it big with Tragic Kingdom. She was wearing a crop top and approximately fifty pounds of makeup (swag). “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!”
“Aw . . . ” She hugged me back. I was wailing. Weeping! Clinging to that bitch like a barnacle. “I love you, too!” Then her belly chain got caught on my necklace. Do you die?!
I accosted them all: Shirley Manson (who said she remembered me), the Presidents of the United States of America (who also said they remembered me), Jewel, the Lush chicks, the cuties from Goldfinger. I didn’t pounce on the Gin Blossoms because . . . they were the Gin Blossoms.
Everyone was nice, but Pat Smear was the best. After I’d attacked him like a bold disturbed mistress—as they say on MediaTakeOut.com—he looped a backstage pass around my neck and took me to get a vegetarian lunch at craft services! Then he brought me into the Foo Fighters’ dressing room to meet Dave Grohl. The three of us—you know, me and basically half of Nirvana—sat and talked for almost an hour! Dave told me he liked my shirt!
Then! Pat took me to the side of the stage to watch No Doubt’s set. I remember looking out at the stadium crowd during “Just a Girl” and thinking . . . well, my first thought was, Shabd is going to hate me. (I was right: she didn’t talk to me for two months.) My second thought was, This is the happiest day of my life.
I loved my new alterna-groupie identity, but my father was not feeling me. He was ultraconservative—and definitely not down with rock ’n’ roll. In the seventies, he took my mom to a Rolling Stones concert at the Superdome in New Orleans, and everyone kept asking him where the bathrooms were—because he was the only guy in the place wearing a tie! And he’d never taken a drug, not even marijuana. He was from a hard-core GOP family (so I was, too): his mother had been president of Republican Women of Pennsylvania. My dad was always doing weird things like declaring the Washington Post to be too liberal (it’s not that liberal) and canceling our subscription, or encouraging me to apply for an internship at the Heritage Foundation.
“If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart,” my dad used to quote Winston Churchill in the car after my soccer games. “If you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head.” Then he’d crank up the Vivaldi.
My dad barely knew who the Cobains were, of course, but he hated my favorite couple almost as much as he hated Bill and Hillary Clinton, the other most famous couple of the nineties. He’d come down to my basement lair just to tear their pictures from the wall.
“Why does he have to be so mean?” I sobbed to my mother after one such . . . desecration. I mean, I understood his problem with Kurt—my dad treated suicidal people every day—but Courtney? She was the best! And my dad had just torn their wedding photo to bits (he’d noticed that Kurt was wearing a dress).
“Your father is just worried about you,” my mom said.
Fair enough. My grades throughout this time were bad. Really, really bad. Unacceptable. Dismal. Gnarly. Atrocious. The pits! I’d been a straight-A student in elementary school—whatever that means to anyone—but as soon as I hit puberty . . . everything went downhill. Everyone treated this “change” like it was some huge mystery; my mom read Reviving Ophelia and all that. Can hormones make you stupid? Because that’s what I think happened.
Also . . . you know what? Some people just aren’t meant for the grind. I was in one of those huge public middle schools, taking seven different classes a day. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t even remember my locker combination! So I started shutting down—figuratively and literally, during classes. I’d been fully alert at ten years old; then I turned eleven and suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I’d fall asleep right there at my desk. And not because I wasn’t totally well rested; I totally was! It was so weird. And in the next class, I’d nod off again, at a different desk.
Desks, desks, desks. Six different desks a day. I felt chained to desks. Sometimes I’d just walk out of a class and not come back. Math class was the worst. Those fucking graphing calculators! When my teachers handed out quizzes, I didn’t even try. I just handed them in blank. And homework? Forget it. I know it wasn’t actually agony and torture, but it felt like agony and torture. How could any normal young person actually be expected to sit and read Cry, the Beloved Country after a full day of school? It just seemed wrong. So I just refused to do it. The brain wants what it wants! And after a long day of classes, my brain wanted to try on rubber dresses at Commander Salamander.
My parents brought in tutors, the whole thing. But my grades kept going down—my confidence, too. I got a D in English; I flunked ceramics. And I did not give a fuck. I just could not get down with school.
I did like one thing about junior high: it wasn’t my crazy house! The situation at 7800 Kachina Lane was no bueno. My family’s fights were so bad. I never brought friends over; I was too nervous. My big sister Emily was always at the center of the storm—especially after she turned fourteen.
She was always getting into it with my dad. I’d be hiding out in my room in the basement.
“GET AWAY FROM ME, ASSHOLE!” she’d be hollering, smashing things up. “OR I’LL BURN THIS WHOLE FUCKING HOUSE DOWN!”
“GODDAMMIT, EM!” My dad. CRASH. Emily’s room was above mine. I never knew what was going on up there. SMASH. It sounded like they were throwing furniture around.
“AAAAAAUUGH!” Emily again. CRASH. THUMP. “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I HATE THIS FUCKING FAMILY!” I did, too.
When she was fourteen and I was thirteen, Emily pulled a knife on my dad in the kitchen. My dad put my sister in a psych ward, then took her out again. I didn’t ask questions—that is, until one Sunday, I came upstairs for breakfast and Emily was gone.
“Your dad’s taking Emily to look at a boarding school,” my mom told me. But only my father came back.
Everyone was supposed to be relieved.
“Now peace shall be restored to the family,” my dad said at our family meeting (he really does talk like that).
“You left her there?” I asked.
And there was a twist: no one was allowed to contact Emily for ninety days.
“Why not?” No answer, again. Shock-a-roo.
After three months, the first letter arrived on pastel-colored stationery. It was like it was written by a very positive, peppy alien.
“I have 30 points now and I’m on Phase 2! So every 4 days I get a candy or a treat! But if you don’t do your chores good enough you don’t get it!”
Umm, I thought, reading this.
The letters came every single day after that. They got progressively stranger. She referred to my dad as “my precious daddy” and to me as “my favorite sis.” (She never wrote my mother—or even mentioned her.)
“Today I got to phase 3. Can you believe it? That means I get to wear Birkenstocks!”
“I am working on so many things! Today it is crocheting and we are reading this excellent book called ‘The Gift’ by Danielle Steel!”
Eventually I understood that Emily was in a lock-up—the kind of place rebellious girls went after they’d been abducted in the night from their own bedrooms. I’d read all about them in Seventeen magazine.
Months passed. The letters got sadder and sadder.
“Honestly I really do feel abandoned and like I am never going to see you again!” she wrote. “I feel also that the family doesn’t think about me and that my presence is not missed!” I felt so guilty: that was how we acted most of the time. “And it is more like a relief that I am here! I am crying writing this!”
It was awful.
My sister’s fifteenth birthday came and went. We couldn’t send her anything. She sent us gifts, though: crocheted monstrosities, made of fifteen different colors of yarn. My mother draped them over the sofas in our ultramodern house. Every time I saw one of Emily’s Cross Creek blankets I felt uncomfortable.
“I got to Phase 4!” the updates continued. “Now I get later shutdowns and get to wear shoes. It’s called Trust Room!”
“Write your sister,” my dad told me gruffly.
“What do I say?” I protested.
Over spring break in eighth grade, we took a family vacation to La Verkin, Utah, to visit her at “boarding school.” She’d been away for six months. Cross Creek Manor looked like a haunted, gloomy plantation house plunked down in the middle of the desert. It had pillars and a porch with no furniture. Then, when you went inside, there was a strange foyer with wrought-iron patio furniture: café tables and chairs. There was a fountain, and fake plants and ivy everywhere—to conceal the bars on the windows.
Jail, I thought.
Emily gave us a tour. It was one windowless, empty room after another.
“This is where we do Seminar,” she said. Emily didn’t tell us then that she had stripped naked in that particular room and danced to “I’m Too Sexy” while other girls—at the encouragement of a staffer—taunted her and called her a whore.
“This is where we eat,” Emily said. She failed to mention the customary predinner music, the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was the signal to the girls to sit down and shut up. Emily also skipped the isolation or “iso” rooms in the basement where she’d spent her first three days of “school” after my dad—who’d tricked her into getting on an airplane—left her there. (You can see photos on CrossCreek.WWaspsn.org, though. While you’re there, check out all of the class-action lawsuits that have been filed by former “students” against the place.)
The final stop was my sister’s room. She shared it with three other girls, and there were two sets of bunk beds. Crocheted blankets were everywhere.
“There was a lice outbreak!” Emily was talking to me, but I was barely listening. I was staring at two skinny lines of hair where her thick, Elizabeth Taylor–esque eyebrows used to be. “But I didn’t get it! And we get to go swimming once a week, but the pool is really dirty, Caitlin, you wouldn’t like it . . .”
Emily’s roommates jumped out of bed to greet us.
“Hiii,” they purred.
“These are my roomies!” my sister said. There was something hysterical in the way she was speaking, like she was a demented cheerleader. I felt so upset. Emily was still talking. The roomies stayed gathered around her. They were like creepy, clingy monkeys. One took my sister’s hand; another rested her head on Emily’s shoulder. The third girl wrapped her arm around Emily’s waist. And all three monkeys were beaming at me. Wide eyes, huge smiles. Where were their eyebrows?
When it was time for us to go, my sister looked so panicked that I almost started crying. I actually hugged her—something I hadn’t done in maybe ten years. Then we left her.
My family spent the next few days crossing the desert in a rental car. I sat in the backseat next to Phil. I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister. Emily was a hell-raiser and a bully, but she was also loving, maternal, and gutsy. One time she hid a kitten from my parents in the basement for a month. She was the greatest babysitter—other families loved her. When my brother was a toddler, she would lift him up and hold him on her hip. She baked cookies in the kitchen. She did all the things my mom didn’t do. She taught me how to shave my legs. When Emily told my dad to go fuck himself, she was standing up for me, too. And now she couldn’t do anything except pluck all of her eyebrows out.
It was nighttime when we arrived in Vegas. I’d never been there before. I pressed my head against the window and looked out at the Strip.
“What do you think, Cait?” my dad asked. But I wasn’t speaking to him.
The letters resumed right when we got home.
“I’m starting the Zoloft you brought me tomorrow,” Emily wrote my dad. “All the staff here thinks it’s funny because I have so much.”
“I am really really worried about Caitlin,” a letter from my sister to my dad begins. (I have a stack of them in front of me, in case you were wondering.) “She seems so upset about things! She actually said she loved me and missed me and wanted me to come home!” It’s dated September 9, 1996—the day before my fourteenth birthday.
“Upset” is right. My parents had said that Emily had to go to Utah so that peace could be restored to our family. But that’s not what happened at all. My dad’s stress—and therefore his temper—was worse than ever. He screamed and screamed, even though there was no one yelling back anymore (my mom, my brother, and I were not fighters—we just shut down). And now, with Emily gone, he screamed mostly at me.
“GODDAMMIT, CAIT!” my dad would roar when I was being “hyper”—too talkative—at dinner. He’d slam his fist on the table so hard that wineglasses would jump. Sometimes Benny the Bear would get up and leave the room. “I’M SICK OF YOUR BULLSHIT.” I never talked back or anything, like my sister did—I’d just clam up.
But inside, I’d be fuming.
What . . . did I ever do . . . to him? You know?
I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling through the dark, thinking about this.
By then, Mimi had moved out of state, leaving the full burden of kooky 7800 Kachina Lane to my dad—and he’d decided to sell. He got a rental offer first, though, so the four of us had moved into the little guest house. My little brother slept on a cot in my parents’ room. I had the other bedroom to myself, but I still felt like my family was right on top of me. I had no basement to retreat to when things got ugly. Which they still did—a lot. Any little thing would set my dad off.
One night I went to sit down for dinner and my Bikini Kill Pussy Whipped CD was at my place. Where did he get that? When had he even been in my room?
“You can forget about that ski trip this weekend, CATO,” my dad snarled. I’d been dying to go on that school ski trip. I wept to my mother.
“I’m sorry,” she told me. She seemed very sympathetic. “I wish there was something I could do. Your dad has his mind made up.”
Then it happened again: I sat down at dinner, and my friend Cale’s Cypress Hill T-shirt was at my place. It had a pot leaf on it. Was my dad going through my closet? I was so confused.
“NO FRIENDS’ HOUSES FOR A MONTH!” my dad roared.
Jesus. Couldn’t he just relax?
No. It got more and more intense. I felt so trapped. My father hated how I dressed—in thrift-store slips, like Courtney and Kate Moss. I weighed eighty-five pounds; I didn’t look skanky. I was trying to dress grunge! He made me start checking in with the vice principal’s office every morning. It was so embarrassing, having my outfit looked over. Half the boys in the high school were wearing that “HEY HO LET’S GO” Ramones shirt. It seemed unfair.
“I hate him,” I sobbed to my mother.
“Your dad loves you so much,” she told me. But it didn’t feel like love. It felt like my dad had failed to control his first daughter, and now he was obsessed with controlling me.
Think I’m exaggerating?
“NO MORE USING THE WORD ‘FEMINISM’ IN THIS HOUSE!” My dad stood up from the table and screamed this at me one night (I guess I’d been . . . talking about feminism?) His face was fucking fuchsia. He went nuts. “THAT WORD IS BANNED, GODDAMMIT!”
I gaped at my mother, who said nothing. Seriously?
That night I was so upset that I took my pillow and comforter into Mimi’s walk-in closet, shut the door behind me, and slept on the floor. I couldn’t get far enough away from my dad.
I wasn’t totally blameless, don’t get me wrong. My ninth-grade report cards were dismal. And now I was in high school, where it counted. This should have “motivated” me, I guess, to improve . . . but . . . I couldn’t get my grades up.
What?! I couldn’t!
I tried. I definitely tried! I am fairly certain that I tried.
I mean . . . I sat with all those stupid tutors they made me sit with. For hours! I did! I did it all! I did whatever they told me to!
“No friends’ houses until your grades come up,” my dad said. He’d decided Shabd—who got straight As—was a bad influence. I was destroyed, of course. My friends were my whole world. Now I wasn’t even allowed to hang with them on the weekends. I went crying to my mother to help me change his mind.
“You can see your friends at soccer,” my mom said. She was all blank in the eyes. I wanted to hit her. I was on a special “select” traveling team. But those girls weren’t my friends. My mom knew that. Also, my dad was an assistant coach. He’d holler from the sidelines with his red yelling face. Ugh, enough!
I sat down to another “offensive” CD at my plate: Pretty on the Inside (featuring “Teenage Whore”). And my dad punished me again. No more music, in fact. My CD player was confiscated.
“Mom,” I begged her. “Please. I just want to listen to music in my room. Do something!”
“I’ll try,” she sighed.
One day I came home from soccer early and walked into my bedroom. My mom was in there—snooping! She jumped a foot in the air. Then it all made sense: she’d been bringing things back to my father . . . and then acting all phony when I came to her. The whole situation was so nuts. I didn’t even blame her. I just didn’t go crying to her after that.
After my “friend privileges” were revoked, I never got them back. Every day after school, I had to come straight home . . . and sit in silence. This didn’t “inspire” me to do my biology homework, though. Instead, I was starting to daydream about escaping. For once, I actually loved a novel I was reading in English class: A Separate Peace, which was set at a New England boarding school. (Remember how the kid bounces the tree branch just so and his more popular, athletic roommate Phineas falls off and breaks his leg? So good.) It might as well have been set at Disneyland: all teenagers, living together away from their parents. “A separate peace” indeed.
But I wasn’t going anywhere. So I passed the time studying what actually interested me: rock stars and fashion magazines. So imagine my excitement when I opened one of my favorite magazines and saw . . . my favorite, much-maligned rock star—in couture! The stunning photographs were by Steven Meisel. Even my dad said that Courtney looked good. I was so delighted that I even wrote the magazine a thank-you note. (I was a weirdo.)
I was chilling at our new brand-new house after school one afternoon in February when the cordless rang.
“This is [so-and-so] from Vogue magazine,” a woman said when I answered. “Is Caitlin Marnell there?” Was I?
Then she told me: my letter to the editor was going to appear in the magazine!
“OMIGOD!” I tried not to scream. I didn’t want Vogue to figure out that I was only fourteen and change their minds.
The letter ran in the April issue:
I have nothing but gratitude to express to you lovely VOGUE editors for your breathtaking piece on my eternally imperial goddess, the (no longer) infamous Courtney Love! [. . .] Thank you ever so much for exposing to the world a goddess who is charming, witty, and indeed pretty on the outside as well as to my Right wing Republican parents! [. . .] Thank you thank you, a million times thank you!
Caitlin Marnell, Bethesda, MD
Being published (sort of) in Vogue was the most exciting thing that had ever, ever happened to me—even better than meeting all those rock stars!
When I wasn’t reading magazines, I was making my own. No, not BQM; that was kid’s stuff. My new joint was a zine. (Teen readers, real quick: imagine if there was suddenly no Internet—forever. No e-mail, nothing. How would you express yourself to strangers? The answer is, you’d write your blogs and Tweets and Facebook posts on paper, and then you’d photocopy them into a homemade magazine. A paper blog! Then you’d send your paper blog out all over the world, and people would send you their paper blogs in return. In envelopes! Amazing, right? That is what a zine is.) Or at least it would be—when I finished it.
In 1997, the web was about to kill off the entire zine community, of course, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew is that I’d been blowing through my allowance mailing stamps and one-dollar bills to people who listed their zines in the Factsheet Five. But if I had my own, I could just trade with people—and I wanted nothing more.
I decided to call mine Alterna-Teen Retard—not the greatest title, sorry. The master copy was a stack of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pieces of paper. I used scissors, Sharpies, glue sticks, words cut from the newspaper, construction paper, stickers, Wite-Out . . . anything and everything. Each page was stiff and heavy with cut-and-paste “layouts” covering both sides. (This way, when I eventually double-sided photocopied them, I could then fold the papers in half and have “digest”-size zines.) Blocks of text were glued on top of the layouts: about feminism, music, rock stars, boys, my crazy family, whatever. On the cover, I’d spelled out A-L-T-E-R-N-A-T-E-E-N in mismatched cutout letters for a ransom-note effect; “Retard” was simply handwritten in cursive. Then, below that: “$1 or Trade.”
I slaved over it every day in my silent bedroom: handwriting headlines and gluing text blocks and then ungluing them, and arranging images and rearranging them. Getting my zine where it needed to be took two months, then three. Alterna-Teen Retard was almost ready to send to press (aka Kinko’s) after four months, but it still needed tweaking. Then I took it to Camp Rim Rock and worked on it through the summer.
By the time I started sophomore year in September, I’d been working on Alterna-Teen Retard for almost seven months. The master copy was up to eighty pages, which I hid in a special Doc Martens box under my desk. While I worked, I daydreamed about X-Day: Xerox Day! I was going to make a hundred copies. Production costs would be financed by Mimi, who always gave me a hundred dollars for my birthday. I could . . . not . . . wait.
Later that month, I went to Mimi’s for a belated fifteenth birthday celebration weekend. I came home on Sunday night with two hundred dollars in my pocket. I went right up to my room to stash the cash in the Doc Martens box with my master copy. But when I opened the box, my zine was gone.
No.
“Mom!” I raced into her room. “Where is it?”
“Hmm?” She was watching Ally McBeal on her chenille armchair.
“MY ZINE!”
“Your what?” my mom said without looking away from the television.
“The magazine I was making,” I said shakily.
Her show went to commercial.
“Oh.” She turned to me. “That.”
“Please give it back!”
“There was sexual stuff in there.” She shuddered.
“I’ll take out whatever you want!” I snapped. “Just give it back!”
My mom shook her head. I could feel hysteria stirring in me.
“There was really horrible stuff about your dad—”
“I’LL TAKE OUT WHATEVER YOU WANT!” My mom looked taken aback. I was supposed to be the passive daughter. “JUST GIVE IT BACK!”
“Calm—”
“GIVE IT TO ME!” I wailed. “IT’S MY ONLY COPY!” I lunged at my mother. I wanted to beat her! But I fell on the carpet on my knees instead. “PLEASE!” Screaming. “THIS IS THE ONLY THING I CARE ABOUT! WHERE IS IT? GIVE IT BACK!”
“Caitlin . . .” my mom said.
“I’ll do anything,” I sobbed. I was still on my knees, pounding on the floor, trying desperately to get through to her. “Please, Mom. If you love me, you’ll give it back. You don’t understand. Please. Please!”
This went on and on. Nothing worked. I’d coaxed “obscene” CDs and things back from her before. But tonight was different. My mom had a funny expression as she watched me implode. That’s how I knew it was bad.
Eventually my mom admitted that she couldn’t give my zine back. She’d shown it to my dad, who’d destroyed it.
“I didn’t know it meant that much to you,” she said.
I ran out of her room, down two flights of stairs, and into the rec room in the basement of our new house.
“AUUUUUUUGH,” I screamed into a sofa pillow.
That was it. My zine was gone. I still feel very teen-angsty about the whole thing, if you can’t tell from this emo chapter. And so angry at my parents. Back then, it was a real watershed moment for me: I was officially done with my family. With Bethesda. With my house. With the dinner table. With it all. I was so fucking done. Game over. I’d lost my sister; I’d lost my “friend privileges”; I’d lost my zine. And I’d definitely lost any respect or affection I had for my parents. It was time for me to get lost, too.