I didn’t really know much about cocaine when I was thirteen. Why would I? Sure, I’d seen coke plenty of times in movies, heard it referenced in the odd song, and knew it was on Nancy Reagan’s list of shit she told us to “Just Say No” to, but I didn’t really know what it did, or how you did it. And I certainly didn’t know that if someone does too much of it their face can literally explode. That blood would come gushing out of their nose, fill their mouth, ruin their shirt, and fuck up the rug they were standing on. That, in a matter of seconds, someone’s face can turn from beautiful, fun, and flirty with perfect lipstick on a gorgeous smile to looking like it just got hit with a bat. That’s exactly what happened to Missy twenty minutes before we had sex for the first time, which was also twenty minutes before I had sex for the first time.
While my dad waited for me outside in the family car.
Going through my class pictures from about grade two through eight is almost comical. You never have to look too hard to find me because I’m in the same spot year after year: back row centre. That spot was always reserved for the tallest kid in the class. That was my spot. I was the tallest kid in the whole damn school. In grade eight, I was just over six feet—I towered over everyone and was taller than most of my teachers. Two weeks after school started that year, the principal of my junior high had to call the high school up the street, where my brother went, to get them to send over six high-school-sized desks and chairs so I’d have a place I could sit in all my classes.
“Here ya go! You’re all set,” I remember my homeroom teacher telling me as he smiled and pointed to my new desk. All my new desks were now in the very back row of all my classrooms. I didn’t get to pick who I wanted to sit beside anymore because the priority, now, was making sure I wasn’t blocking someone else’s view. Sure, I was finally comfortable, but man, I felt like shit about it some days. I still do. I’m still hyperaware of blocking someone’s view, getting in their space, or ruining their night. I haven’t willingly sat in the middle of a row at a movie theatre in my entire life. I usually grab any available aisle seat and turn my body so my big head doesn’t block the person behind me. I don’t enjoy going to the movies, and I hate having anyone behind me.
Being that tall and looking so much older, people just assumed stuff about me. People either thought I was older or, because I looked older, they thought I’d be able to handle things that other kids couldn’t. This was why guys double my age would think I was a fair fight, and why grown women would flirt with me or grab at me and say shit that you just shouldn’t say to a kid who’s thirteen going on fourteen. Men would see me as a threat, and women would sometimes look at me like lunch.
We don’t ever really discuss sexualizing young men—and we sure as hell didn’t then. Today, and when it comes to girls, we know what to do and how to shut it down. We know just how bloody damaging it is to sexualize young girls, even when we fail as a society to protect them. Courageous people with a lot of fight in them have battled for decades to change the dynamic for young girls. As a father, I am part of that battle now. But for boys, or at least for me, it was easier to just become the thing people thought I was than it was to fight back. So that’s what I did. Most times I just became the person everyone expected.
But other times, every now and then, I’d use looking older to my advantage. Like to get into places I shouldn’t be.
Midsummer, the year before grade eight, a friend of a friend named Ryan caught wind of a “teen bar” forty minutes out of town called Club 404, or 606 or Something-oh-Something, I don’t remember. The legend was that this place was a headbangers’ paradise. Loud music, a dance floor, cheap Pepsi, and tons of out-of-town girls, with a McDonald’s in the same parking lot. Paradise. They didn’t serve alcohol, but you still had to be sixteen to get in, which for me was never going to be a problem—I looked the part. I think on normal nights Club 404 or whatever was a regular bar for grown-ups, but one night a week they did this “teen night” between seven and ten. Putting the guest list together was a challenge because not everyone I knew would pass for sixteen, and if one of us got popped trying to sneak in, we were all going down and none of us were getting in.
The first time we went, Ryan and I roped in a third tall kid, convinced my dad that this was a place specifically for kids our age, and got him to drive us. While my old man sat in the car smoking cigarettes and reading the paper, we partied. Hard. We were Rock Stars in that place. Three skids who could clear the dance floor and headbang the hardest every time AC/DC played.
One night, we formed a circle with a dozen or so out-of-town skids when “You Shook Me All Night Long” came on. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a girl off to the side, by the tables, staring at me. After a few head whips and hair flips, I looked back to see if she was still there. She was, only now she was smiling. We locked eyes and stared at each other. I was paralyzed. I stood there, trying not to break eye contact while in the middle of teenage heavy metal mayhem. She started doing something with her hands, over and over, motioning towards me and then waving me over. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she kept doing it as I made my way across the dance floor. When I got close enough, she reached out, grabbed me, and hugged me like we were best friends. I was so confused. I was convinced she thought I was someone else, but then she introduced herself.
“You’re fucking tall,” she said as she let her arms go from around my shoulders. “I’m Missy.”
“I’m Roz. What was that?” I asked. “That thing with your hands?”
“It was sign language. I know sign language.”
I didn’t really know what to do with that, so I said, “Cool,” dropped it, and moved on. “Are you from here? Do you live around here? Do you come here all the time? It’s awesome, huh? How old are you?” I was burning through all my prime questions because I was nervous as hell. Missy didn’t look like any girl who’d ever hugged me before. She felt different. She hugged different.
“I’m outta here in a few months,” she said. “They won’t let me back in after I’m nineteen. Soooo, too old for this place.” She said that like I could relate. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me in tight, and led me over to introduce me to her friends. One guy named Dude Rude who looked like a chubby David Lee Roth, and another guy named Vlad who was about six foot seven, hairy as hell, and told me he was the leader of a gang called The Law. I thought that sounded stupid and made-up, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to blow it. Missy wrapped her arm around my waist and walked us away from the group.
“Don’t you want to know what I was saying? When I was signing?” she asked.
Yeah, oh my god, for sure. “What?” I shot back quickly.
“I said ‘I want you’…”
Jesus Christ.
“Then I said ‘Come here,’ and now you’re here.”
I was frozen.
“How old are you?” she asked, and without even taking a breath I leaned in and whispered the word “Seventeen” into her ear. A few minutes later we were alone in the back of the bar, in the dark, at one of the tables nobody ever sat at, making out. And that’s what we’d do for the next two Fridays while my friends headbanged and my dad waited outside in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and reading the paper. I became the person she hoped I was. The person she expected.
Right around the time Missy was turning nineteen, I convinced my dad to drive me a half-hour out of town, to a “friend’s” place. I don’t remember exactly who I said she was, or how I said I knew her, but I was a trustworthy and convincing kid. Plus, I said her parents would be home, so it wasn’t really a problem. I got the address, gave it to my dad, and scheduled a time for him to pick me up. I knew he wasn’t going far, so there was no way he was going to be late getting me.
I had two hours.
Missy answered the door. This wasn’t her house, she told me, “But sometimes I stay here.” She was wearing the same white blazer and black stretch pants she was wearing at the bar the week before. I think her T-shirt was different, but her socks were definitely the same. Thick, green, and wool. The kind you’d find if you went digging around an Army Surplus store. Missy introduced me to her friend and said that this was her place, which I already knew because her living room was covered in framed family photos. It was clear that the friend’s parents were not home.
We spent the next hour or so sitting in their living room listening to music. Those two were on a completely different level from me. They were fucking loud and all over the place! There was no making out, and when Missy did sit beside me, she would just squeeze my hand, close her eyes, and sway back and forth. I didn’t really know what I was doing there, or why I was invited. Missy seemed like she really didn’t give a shit, but she looked beautiful doing it. As the two girls danced around the living room and made their way into the attached dining room, singing Bon Jovi at the top of their lungs, I sat on the couch mouthing along to “Wanted Dead or Alive,” trying to fit in. Then the singing stopped, and all I heard was “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Missy! Too much blow. Fuck!”
I shot up out of the couch. They’d been in the other room for maybe two minutes, but when I ran in Missy had her T-shirt pulled up over the front of her face while her friend had her hands cupped under Missy’s chin trying to catch the blood. Missy saw me standing there and just said, “I’m sorry.”
Her friend pointed her bloody hand at me, and then at the couch, and shouted, “Sit! Don’t move.”
Fifteen minutes later Missy came back into the living room wearing only a towel. Her hair was soaking wet and brushed back. Her makeup was washed off, and she was out of breath. Exhausted.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again as she put out her hand and pulled me up off the couch.
I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
She led me upstairs to her friend’s bedroom, closed the door behind us, and walked me over to the bed.
Fifteen minutes later I was in the car with my dad.
“All right, you all set, dude?” my dad asked as I slid into the passenger seat.
“Yeah, Pop. All set,” I blurted out, trying to seem enthusiastic and normal as I attempted to put the pieces together and process what the hell had just happened in there.
“Hey! What. Did. You. Guys. Do?” he asked as he gave me two fist bumps on my knee to get my attention, which was probably the second or third time he’d asked that same question without getting an answer from me.
“Yeah. It was fun. Listened to music. Hung out. Played Ping-Pong in the basement. Stuff like that. Cool parents.”
The ride home was awful. I could tell my dad knew something was up. He didn’t know what, but he sure as hell knew something. I knew that most of what had just happened was, eventually, going to come out over the dinner table with him, my mom, and my brother. I couldn’t remember all of it, but what I did remember was going to come out. It’s what our family did.
During that time, I was pretty much living a double life. Half of me was juggling the lies and cover-ups of my relationship with Missy, while the rest of the time I was just kickin’ it doing normal kid stuff. I played with wrestling dolls, rode bikes, listened to metal, and hung out in Ethan’s basement playing darts and watching his older brother’s porno. Normal kid stuff. Ethan and I started hanging out just before the end of grade seven, right before summer. He lived down the street and had one of those basements that mothers of young boys never went down to. The most you’d get was yelled at from the top of the stairs when dinner was ready, or she needed you to flip the laundry. Moms knew better.
Ethan made me laugh like no other kid ever did. He’s still one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and the only friend I told the truth to about my relationship with Missy. And he knew everything!
On September 24, 1988, Ethan and I were in his basement getting ready to watch the men’s 100 metre finals at the Seoul Olympics. Like everyone else in the country, we were glued. This was the Ben Johnson versus Carl Lewis showdown that we had been waiting weeks for. Up to that point Ethan and I would bet on the events as they were happening live. Neither of us had any money, so we’d wager things like a charley horse punch to the thigh, pouring an entire glass of water into the other guy’s earhole, or having a tennis ball whipped at your nuts if you lost. Stuff like that. Totally normal. For the 100 metre finals we both agreed that this last bet had to be the biggest. High risk, high reward. After picking our favourites to win—I had Ben Johnson, he took Carl Lewis—we both agreed that the loser would have to eat a fart. If you lost, you’d lie down on your back, open your mouth, and let the winner squat over your face and fart right in your mouth. Then you’d have to chew. It wouldn’t count if you didn’t chew.
Ben Johnson won that night, in record time, and Ethan made good on our bet. He ate my fart.
As I was leaving his place he asked if I wanted to hang out the next night. “Sorry, man, I can’t.” Sunday nights were Missy Nights. On Sundays after six you could make long-distance phone calls for half the price, so my mom would let me call Missy for an hour after dinner. On Sundays I lived that other life.
In the next few weeks Ben Johnson would be stripped of his medal for doping and they handed it to Carl Lewis. It was the biggest scandal in sports history. And my bet with Ethan became the biggest scandal in friend history.
Later that month Ethan’s dad died of a heart attack. Suddenly. I remember Ethan took about a month off from school, came back for a week or two, and then he was gone. His mum packed them up and moved to the West Coast, and he just disappeared. We saw each other briefly one other time, but other than that we never talked again.
The time came, and I sat down with my family at one of our spectacular dinners to tell them everything. That I’d met a new girl, that the club was actually for older kids, and I lied to get in. That I was in love with Missy, that her friends wanted me to join their gang, that we had sex, and that she was eighteen going on nineteen. I somehow thought that if I said she wasn’t quite nineteen yet that this would lessen the blow a bit. It didn’t.
“I want you to meet her. I want her to come over,” I said.
“How old does she think you are?” my mom asked.
“Seventeen,” I replied.
“Does she know about me?” my brother asked.
“Yeah, of course. I didn’t lie about that.”
“So how old am I supposed to be, then?”
“You’re still sixteen.”
“Wait! So now I’m your little brother?”
“Yeah. That would be cool if we could go with that,” I replied.
As a parent, and I’m saying this now as one myself, you play out scenarios in your head all the time. You have conversations, make plans, and try to have all the answers and solutions ready to go when your kids come to you looking for advice, or ask you to expand your boundaries with trust and freedom. Sleepover camp, a cell phone, or those first relationships—the innocent ones. We prepare for those, and I’m sure my parents had too. But I had just told my folks that I had been to the moon, on a stolen ticket, and I wasn’t coming home. They were not prepared for this.
“Okay. We’ll meet her,” my dad said, clearly trying to process all that while still keeping his cool. “Bring her over. But no more going there, understood?”
“Yeah, Pop. No problem.”
I knew that what I was asking my family to do was huge. I was asking them all to lie for me, switch our entire family dynamic so my big brother became my little brother, talk to me like I was a senior in high school, and allow me, who just turned fourteen, to have my much older girlfriend come to the house for sleepovers. And my family did. All of them.
For years I thought it was cool that my parents and my brother went along with it, but as I got older, I realized that they were all just terrified. They did their best, right or wrong, not to lose me. There was no going back for me. There was no way to rewind time and pretend none of that was happening. They were afraid I’d leave, or run away, take off with Missy and my new much older friends. That I’d join a stupid gang called The Law, get into trouble, and fuck my future. My family did what they always did. They tried to keep me safe. Keep me close. Keep me home.
For the rest of that fall, through the winter, and into spring, I kept things going with Missy, while my parents, and my little brother, played right along. We’d talk on the phone for an hour on Sundays and once, maybe twice a month she’d come and spend the night when she could borrow a car. The rules were pretty simple in my house: I’d sleep in my room, and she’d get the pull-out in the basement. But that never stopped us. We always found time.
Missy never really talked about her family, and when she did, she’d flip back and forth between referring to her parents as Mom and Dad and using their real names. She always looked like she was catching herself in a lie, and she’d correct it right after. It was confusing, but I never asked.
She always seemed to over-pack when she’d come to my place for the night. She had an old white canvas bag with a broken zipper that everything was always spilling out of. For one night at my place, she always packed the same things—two or three pairs of stretch pants, a few T-shirts, her white blazer, an extra pair of shoes, her makeup bag, and an old pencil case with all her jewellery. This seemed a lot for just one night, but, again, I never asked.
As the weather started to get warmer, I went through a period of well over a month without seeing her. We’d still talk on the phone on Sundays, but it wasn’t the same, or enough. Missy couldn’t get a car and there was no cheap or direct bus that would get her to my place. I begged my dad to go pick her up, which after a long conversation with my mother, he agreed to. What choice did they have? I was going to see her one way or another.
While my dad waited in the driveway, I walked up to Missy’s front door and rang the bell. I had never been to her place before, and other than her parents’ first names, I knew nothing about her family.
When I walked in, the house was absolute mayhem. There were kids everywhere—all different ages, and all different races. No two looked even remotely like brother and sister, and her parents were old! Like grandparent old.
I didn’t know anything about group homes or foster care, but Missy did her best to quickly explain it all to me as she led me down the basement stairs to her room. She said this was the fifth place she’d lived and because she was over eighteen, she’d “aged out,” but she was good with the kids, knew sign language, and helped out with expenses, so her “parents” were letting her stay a little longer.
Missy’s bedroom was at the far corner of their unfinished basement. She’d built herself her own space by hanging bedsheets with thumbtacks onto the wood stud walls. She whipped open one of the sheets and led me in, then told me to grab a seat while she packed up. Missy’s bedroom was a cot and a sleeping bag on a concrete floor. There was an exposed light bulb up above with a shoelace dangling from it.
“Cool,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I love it.”
Missy didn’t reply as she frantically gathered up her things and threw them into her white canvas duffle bag with the broken zipper. She wasn’t over-packing for one night, she was packing up everything she owned, which I then realized was what she did every time she left. She was on the clock, and this family was temporary, and it was going to be her last. Missy was living a life that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t ask too many questions or open up. I’d told too many lies, and if we started talking, like actually telling each other things, I would have blown it and it would be over.
By this time, I was a couple of months away from graduating grade eight. Those were my last few months in junior high, which sucked because our house was right beside my school. On our street it went: my house, a small parking lot, then my school. I could go home to pee if I wanted to. One afternoon in woodshop my teacher walked up behind me and told me they were calling me to the office. I left my goggles and gloves on the bench, brushed off the sawdust, and walked out.
“Your mom called and wants you to come home,” the secretary told me. Mom was working in real estate at that time, so her being home in between showings wasn’t unusual. But pulling me out of school early was.
“Like, right now?” I asked.
“Yeah, she said to grab your things for the day and head home. She needs you home.”
The only other time my parents pulled me out of school was when my mom’s brother, my uncle Mac, died years earlier and we had to drive to Montreal for his funeral. I was terrified. Who’d died?
As I headed across the small parking lot, I saw a car parked in our driveway. It was Missy’s car. The one she sometimes borrowed to drive to see me. This wasn’t a planned weekend visit—this was a Wednesday afternoon. I was dead. I knew that in less than a hundred steps I was going to walk through that front door to my own funeral.
Missy and my mom were sitting at the kitchen table.
“Sit down,” my mom said without looking at me. “Missy, what do you want to say?”
I sat down, right where my mom said to, looked at Missy, caught my breath, and looked away. I never looked back. Her face was covered in tears. “I came to take you for lunch. To surprise you. I went to your school, the high school, and asked the receptionist if she could page you to the office. She told me they didn’t have a Roz Weston at the school, but that they did have a Richard Weston. She said you were his little brother who went to the junior high down the street.” I don’t actually remember Missy saying any of this. I don’t remember anything after I sat down right where my mom told me to. My only memory of this conversation, how it all went down, was listening to my mom retell it to my brother when he got home from school, and then again to my dad when he got home from work.
I also don’t remember what I said, or how we decided what we decided next, but after all that—after there were no more lies and the truth was out—Missy and I didn’t break up.
Reading that probably doesn’t make you feel good. It shouldn’t. But for me, this was about guilt and survival. Any hurt caused was caused by me. This was all on me. These were my lies, this was my mess, and this was all my fault. I felt incredibly bad that I put my mom through that situation, that now she was a liar too. I was devastated that I just ruined what was most likely the closest thing to an actual family that Missy had ever known. I didn’t have the maturity or skills to fix any of it—so I just carried on like none of it ever happened.
Grade eight graduation was coming up and there was no way I’d be able to take Missy as my date, so I asked a girl in my class named Kathy if she’d go with me. Missy still went to my grad, but she drove there herself, and sat in the audience with my parents. Nobody asked who she was.
One of the last times I saw Missy, we spent the entire time talking. We’d never really talked before, not without lying, anyway. I have tons of holes in my memory of my past, but especially from that year. I don’t remember the details of a single one of our Sunday-night-after-six phone calls, or how we’d spend our time when she came for those weekends. Even writing this was a fight to try to put the pieces together. It’s a blur. So I’m not sure how or why we started talking about it, but the question of what we would do if she ever got pregnant came up. This wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about, but it was obvious Missy had.
“You’d never know if I got pregnant,” she told me seriously. “I’d just disappear. I’d never ask you to be a part of that. You don’t have to worry about that. Ever. Okay?” That I do remember, because she said that to me looking straight into my eyes, with one hand on the side of my face. Then she pulled me in and kissed me on the forehead, and that was the end.
Missy only spent the night that one last time, and then, just like that, she was gone. I don’t remember the last conversation we had, but I certainly know we never said goodbye or officially broke up. She was just gone. I called the house a few times and spoke to her foster parents, left a couple of messages, but I never heard from her ever again.
In the years after, while I was still in high school, Missy’s name would come up every now and then among friends, and to be honest, I didn’t have enough hands for all the high-fives I was giving. I was an absolute Legend, but I’d always end the story right before the part about what we’d do if she ever got pregnant. Nobody ever got the whole truth. Nobody ever got the part that hollowed me out. This is a story I stopped telling when I came to realize how out of their depths my parents were. How they just tried to manage a complicated, and terrifying, situation as best they could without losing me. I wonder now how many nights they must have stayed up talking about whether they were doing the right thing or not. I wonder how awful they must have felt.
Do I think my parents failed me? No, and I hope you don’t either, because there’s a real good chance that if they didn’t handle that year the exact way they did, I wouldn’t be here. They did their best. But like everyone else in my life back then, they probably thought I could handle much more than a kid my age should be able to.
As an adult, I can truthfully admit that that year fucked me up. But it was years—decades—before I realized it. Did Missy vanish because she was pregnant? I don’t know. Is it something I think about all the time, even today? Absolutely.
I never wanted Missy to fall in love with me, but I did want to be the person she thought she fell in love with. And that right there is the thing I would repeat—the mistake I would make—for most of my life.
Every relationship after Missy, I would become the person that the other person saw. I would become the thing that they wanted me to be. When someone would describe me to somebody else, they would be so off, and so wrong, but I didn’t know how to be with people my own age or build an honest relationship. Even when I was married, I wasn’t really me. I was this person who adapted to be who my then wife and her friends thought I was.
Once social media became a thing, and I got on television, just about everyone from my past who I was ever friends with reached out in one way or another. Hundreds of people I went to high school with, old teachers, people I used to headbang with, and just about every girl I ever dated connected and said hi.
There are, however, two people I’ve never heard from. Missy is one of them. At least once a year, even now, I’ll do a search for her, but her real name is very common, which makes things tough. I just keep replaying that conversation we had over and over. I probably always will.
I wish I could tell you that Missy was the last woman that I terrified my parents with, but she wasn’t. I spent a lot of my high school years bringing home strippers, more girls who did more drugs, and more women years older than me. Again and again my mom and dad would just do their best, manage the risk, and try to keep me close.
I’ve grown to hate not getting closure, and I absolutely can’t stand the feeling of owing anybody anything. I always have to close things out. Debts, favours, relationships—I hate loose ends.
The second person who never reached out on social media was Ethan, that friend from grade eight who I made that bet with. All I know is that even now, with me being a level-headed and totally respectable dad with a big fancy job, if Ethan ever came calling looking for payback, I’d happily close out that debt. I’d eat a fart.