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Liam had it down to a science He went soo, not because it was cheap or because I had any shred of dignity left--I didn’t The first night I walked home with three-hundred and fifty bucks cash inon top of thatdignity went out the door What Lia that I couldn’t create inside

My pretending ertips that slid up my muscled arainst my back as we fake danced She became the woman I wished would want me, and so, in that sense ere all fair and balanced, weren’t we? My audience wanted me to be someone else, and I wanted them to be someone else The difference waswell,on each other’s ability to pretend

It’s not a lie if everyone walks away happy, right? It’s all fun as long as no one gets hurt

If it wasn’t a lie, and it was fun, then why couldn’t I bring ined telling her what ine was howfun

And started being a lie

Amy

The party Darla invited me to was in one of those Brownstones in the Back Bay, the kind of place that looked like it could be in a Sherlock Holmes filht, it was a jaroup of ained international notoriety and that, soed to befriend

She was such an odd duck--her ability to roups was soue-tied around people ere different from me I didn’t understand how to act around so in my little suburban bubble had seee and realized that there were lots of other ways to live

The proble that the way I was raised wasn’t the only way and that I had choices, and yet, possessing absolutely no social skills to function outsidethat awareness, but how do you get fro that about yourself to experiencing life enough to acquire another set of skills in a radically different socialhow to be all of the different yous that you can be

Mom expected one Amy--her Amy And one Evan, except Evan only kne to be one kind of Evan, and that was Drunk and High Evan So, I had to be one kind of Amy, and that was Good Little Girl Amy, because when someone else’s role is already defined you’d better find soet your own sliver of attention that’s just yours So far, that’s how life had workeduntil now

I watched Darla, who had been living in a trailer park, working in a gas station, leading the way for o into a place so fancy that the door itself probably cost as e And she just walked in like she owned the place Not in soant She was justthere, h tied her She turned out to be one of the better friends I could i

Plus, she was the keeper of the secret of ina I had to hold her close

"It’s way up here, on the fifth floor," she said, turning behind as alked up a set of stairs, and then another, and then another You would think that extraordinarily rich people could afford elevators Maybe, though, we just weren’t allowed to use theot to the top floor, I realized that the structure of the townhouse was fascinating It was one long, narrow hoine a row of ten, or twenty, or more, town homes, all five or six stories tall, it was hard to tell Some were entire town hole floor to themselves Other homes were cut up into a combination of apartments In some cases, people rented entire floors, and in other cases the floors themselves were chopped up into tiny little studios and one-bedrooms This was a new layout forin my own little, quirky aparthout Boston You take a city that’s nearly four hundred years old and you’re going to find soe historical details That’s the way history worked If you dug enough, and paid enough attention, you could find just about anything you were looking for, frolorious

The crowd spilled out already through the threshold of the apart shoulders and hips in ways that seemed to make people part She said "hello" here and there to people she recognized, a quick wave of a hand, a glance of a smile, and then ere just suddenly on a back balcony that people seeh the threshold, Darla stopped me "Hey I want you to meet Jane"

"Jane?"

"Jane Newhouse This is her place"

"Oh, Jane"