Prologue

I’m not sure when I became an impostor. It wasn’t a conscious decision, more a slow, smooth slide into something that felt, just, easier. Maybe it was in sixth grade, when I told my mom that I wanted to take piano lessons, but she convinced me to play sports instead because it was more social. I’ve played soccer for six years. Truth is, I hate soccer.

Or it might have been in ninth, when Ms. Emery, the school guidance counselor, with an office the size of a broom closet, cocked her head to the side and asked, “You doing all right, Jess?” and I replied cheerily, “Yep, I’m great.” It was simpler than explaining that Jenny Glocke had suddenly stopped talking to me for no apparent reason and that the tense exchanges that drifted from beneath my parents’ bedroom door had started to become tenser. “Great” was what my mom crisply replied when we were visiting my grandparents in Florida and Gammy would ask, with narrowed eyes, “How are things at home?”

Or maybe it was the day Ryan Hart asked me if I liked to ski, a lone dimple winking from his right cheek, and I looked down at the hot dog in my hand and nodded and told him, “Yeah, sure.” It was Labor Day 2003, and we were at a barbecue in the Harts’ backyard. They’d just moved to Keene from Boston. Our parents were friends from their college days who hoped Ryan and I, both entering eighth grade, would be friends, too.

We sat on top of a picnic table under an oak tree whose leaves had yet to turn for fall. With honey-tan skin and boy-band hair, Ryan was certifiably, undeniably, trademark Cute™ in the charming, slightly aloof way of the love interest of an eighties movie. Late-afternoon sun filtered through the branches, making the fine blond down on his forearms glow. He appeared golden.

Even his name was made for doodling in the margins of a notebook or murmuring under your breath just to see how the syllables felt in your mouth: Ryan Olivier Hart. For the next year and a half, every textbook I owned, every diary, every scrap of paper that came through my hands bore some calligraphed form of his initials within a perfectly lopsided heart.

At school, a single “hey” as we passed in the hall—on Tuesdays and Thursdays after second block, and some Fridays if he was coming from Mrs. Cardinetti’s—was enough to spin me into orbit. What was the inflection of that “hey”? Was there eye contact? Sustained eye contact? When he asked if I was coming to the Harts’ holiday party, did that imply he hoped I was coming, or was he just being polite? I tortured myself—as well as my best friend, Katie—with the possibilities.

Ryan was everything I thought I was supposed to be: confident, popular, easy, at ease. Where I strained, he glided. Where my small clique of best friends was hard won, popularity seemed to come to him instantly. Our social circles overlapped in a thin, almond-shaped sliver, but Ryan Hart was nice to me. And sometimes, I suspected—hoped—he even sought me out.

The truth is, I do not ski. In fact, I hate the cold. Mummifying yourself in six layers of clothes in order to careen down the side of a mountain while someone screams at you about pizza slices and French fries is something I will never understand. Yet in that moment, when Ryan asked me on the picnic table in his parents’ backyard if I liked to ski, it was so easy to say . . . Yeah, sure. Two little words. But words have weight.

The next fall, Ryan would go to Mountainvale Academy, a special boarding school in Maine for elite winter athletes. They had a really good ski racing team, and turns out, Ryan was a really good skier.

I never told him that, actually, I hate skiing. Even when our families went to Sugarloaf the following Christmas and I faked a stomachache so I wouldn’t have to show him how bad I actually was at the thing he loved most in life. I’d rather Ryan Hart believe I had explosive diarrhea than know I don’t like skiing—that’s how devoted I was to my story.

Even when we started dating later that winter, I didn’t fess up. It was too late by then, anyway, once I’d been kissed outside the arcade room in the basement of the ski lodge. My first kiss, the one I’m told I’ll always remember, and I will: my heart exploding into a million tiny sucker-red pieces.

The following week, he called from the shared phone on his dormitory hall because he didn’t have cell reception at school. We talked about everything and nothing: scary movies and funny videos, the virtues of fast food, our siblings’ exceptional ability to annoy the crap out of us, and his coach, who’d once trained the Olympic team. Something I said made him laugh. We talked for an hour, through three different dormmates pestering him to give up the phone.

Our first date was to Athens Pizza V, home of the famous heart-shaped pizza. Mrs. Hart dropped us off, grinning from ear to ear. “You know she’s calling your mom right now,” he said, clearly embarrassed, as we watched the Volvo pull away. He held the door for me and paid for my pizza. It felt so adult, so much like wooing. Two months later, nonchalantly, in the middle of a conversation about our favorite breakfast cereals, Ryan Hart called me his girlfriend. And that’s what I happily became.

I never told him that, actually, I hate mushrooms on my pizza. Or that concerts freak me out because I dislike big crowds—sometimes small ones, too. I did not share that I found the video games we played in his basement too loud and too violent, that they made me feel anxious but that I feel that way 99 percent of the time anyway. That I sometimes cry in the shower or that, although I like being alone, I fear being lonely. Ryan did not know that I filled thick notebooks with the stories I imagined and that, while I was too embarrassed to say it out loud, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

My boyfriend knew a different Jess—a laid-back, outgoing, adventurous Jess, ready for anything, whether that meant breaking into a neighbor’s pool or nursing a skunky beer while watching three Fast and Furious movies in a row. This Jess was cool. She was girlfriend material. The Jess who lost sleep over grades, who often preferred books to people, whose body physically hurt when she was forced to try something new—Ryan didn’t know that Jess. I made sure he never did.

It wasn’t just with him, of course. I pretended, in ways, with everyone—my parents, my teachers, even sometimes Katie. The bottom line is that there were two of me: the Jess I showed the outside world and the Jess I knew on the inside. Every day a performance—laugh, smile, engage.

It’s surprisingly easy to pretend to be someone you’re not. Writers do it all the time; that’s how they write a story—pluck a character from the air and try her on for size. What I know now is that we’re all made up of stories, the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell each other. They’re the masks we wear every day, the personal histories we write and revise again and again, the futures we imagine, the images we project online, the narratives we construct in order to fit in.

Then there are the other stories, the stories we don’t tell, the ones we lock away within the hidden, dark rooms of ourselves—the secrets. Here’s what I also know now: secrets tend to seek the light.