After I finished fifth grade, we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where I started middle school at Ashley Hall, an all-girls school steeped in Southern traditions. We had visited my brother at military school in Virginia Beach, and my parents had grown fond of the South during frequent trips to see my ailing grandmother. Before she passed away, they started looking for a place of our own. At first, we lived in a back guesthouse of a beautifully remodeled traditional Charleston house in the center of town.
But Charleston was a place rooted in tradition and history. And because I wasn’t from there and came from the North, I was instantly branded “the Yankee,” and it was easily decided that I wouldn’t fit in, no matter how hard I tried. I poured all of my energy into my studies because that was the one thing I could control and lose myself in. I spent a lot of time with myself, riding my bike around to see the few friends I did make, including a new girl who came midyear and said, “I’m glad we’re friends, because when I first came here, everyone told me not to be friends with you.”
I felt pretty lost and such pressure to fit into a box I couldn’t squeeze into. I wanted to be expressive and weird, but I felt I needed to shop at the Gap and Express in order to be accepted. My mother even decorated my room in all Laura Ashley, and I hated it. I felt stifled. I was never the frilly, delicate girl everyone expected and wanted me to be. But I learned to pretend and play the game. I made one good friend while I was there, a girl named Jennie. One day I invited her to sit next to me in class and we became fast friends who remain close to this day.
I have no explanation why that was, but I was grateful. Jennie was fun and sweet and smart. She knew everyone in Charleston and helped me feel less alone. I feel like she gave me a safe space to be myself and I probably helped her express her wilder, more adventurous side. Her family and their beautiful home downtown reminded me of Hilltop and confirmed my belief that such places were real and possible.
Jennie and I became best friends and soon developed a shared passion for the film Beaches. We sang and danced to the songs in the movie, convinced we were just like the two characters with their intensely deep expressions of love and friendship. She was the first of the many friends I would have whose home lives replaced things lacking in my own.
Around this same time I met my middle brother’s friend Kenny James Thorn. We were living downtown, in our back guesthouse off Queen Street, and KJ, as he was known, was frequently there, hanging out with my brother. He was my brother’s age—about three years older than me—and in high school. I might have been one of the reasons he was at our house. I don’t know why he would have been attracted to someone so much younger, but he was, and though it might have annoyed my brother, I didn’t mind the attention.
My first hint that he liked me came one night when the three of us were alone at the house. My mother and everyone else had gone out. It was late, and I had said goodnight to the boys and gone to bed. I don’t know how long I had been asleep before I was jolted awake to the sound of the Police’s song “Roxanne” blasting from my brother’s room. It was so loud the speakers might as well have been in my room. Then they burst into my room like naughty pranksters, and the next thing I knew KJ hopped up on my bed and hovered over me.
It was typical adolescent behavior and not that far removed from the way my first so-called boyfriend in grade school let me know he liked me with a sharp kick. He always picked on me, and I hated him for it so much that he became my first kiss.
KJ would be different, very different, in the sense that his “kick” ripped whatever was left of my childhood from me and put it out of reach forever.
I was approaching the end of my twelfth year. We were living downtown while my family built a home in a new subdivision on a lake. It was a busy, consuming time for my parents, who made frequent trips back and forth to check on the work. One morning I woke up in our guesthouse and realized I had started to bleed. It wasn’t much at first and I wasn’t too alarmed, but I had no idea what was happening since my parents had never spoken to me about the changes I would experience as I began adolescence and my body matured.
However, as the day went on, the flow of blood coming out of me got redder and redder and more and more. Alarmed and afraid, I went into my mother’s room. With tears pouring out of my eyes, I told her what was happening and said I thought I was dying. I wish I could say she consoled me and offered comforting, positive reinforcement about becoming a woman and the power and responsibility that went along with that amazing transformation. But she didn’t, and I don’t know why. Instead, we had a brief, awkward conversation, and I was told to expect more of the same every month.
Needing to look elsewhere for the warmth I craved, I found KJ ready and waiting. He had started writing me love letters that spoke of his deep affection for me. In these letters, he described in great detail what he saw in me and what he loved about me and how much he wanted to be with me. He was clearly obsessed, but it was the kind of attention I wanted as I took this new step into womanhood feeling disappointed in my mother and uncertain and alone.
Here was this guy who thought about my hair, went to sleep thinking about my eyes, woke up hoping to see my smile, and felt like his day was always better if he got even a short glimpse of me. What young, insecure girl wouldn’t respond to such positive attention from a boy, and an older one at that? How could I resist?