I was in my room, lit only by the glow of my MacBook, talking to my WoW friends. I jumped into the channel (the program we used back then worked a lot like Discord, if you know what that is) and saw a new name, V. Upon entering, I immediately exclaimed “Yo, who the hell is V?” and was greeted by an unexpectedly higher-pitched response, “Me”. V was a girl, a rare occurrence in the world of MMORPGs. The rest of the channel informed me she was new, a friend of Paul’s.

If you didn’t know this already, I like to fuck around. I wasted no time asking absurd questions to break the ice and see just who V was. Did she like her toast darker or lighter, did she think people who talk on speakerphone in public are the scourge of the earth, did she tip on carryout orders, or only if she dined in? The best way I can describe the dynamic in that friend group of mine is silly. Just silly. With so many hours spent together, we’d often get lost on bizarre tangential bits, spending hours poking fun at each other for ridiculous things.

Like Jared, who once said, “I’ll be right back, I need to get a Coca-Cola” — who the hell says the full name? Are you my great-grandfather? What was life like before color TV? Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?

At some point during the friendly interrogation of V, having answered her preferences on salad dressings, breakfast foods, and weighing in on yoga pants vs. jeans with a surprising “neither”, someone brought up accents. We started talking about the most and least attractive: Australian ranked highly, Canadian and Southern not so much. V hadn’t responded, and we poked her for an answer. She said Russian. Russian? Really? I do a great fake Russian accent. This was common knowledge to everyone but V, and I quickly sent a message to Alex, one of the people in the channel, telling him to follow my lead. We were about to have ourselves a prank.
“Hey Alex, what ever happened to that guy Dima; does he still play?” I asked, back in the channel for all to hear.

“Yeah, I haven’t talked to him in a while though.”

“Don’t you have his cell number? Sounds like V might want to meet him. I have to go to dinner with my family, but maybe I can catch you all later if he’s around.”

Neither Dima nor the dinner were real. Alex “texted” him, I left, changed my display name, and came back thirty minutes later, flipping on the accent and did my best not to break character as V couldn’t help but probe “Dima” with questions, laugh too much at his bad jokes, and let her thirst echo through the conversation.

I can’t remember how long we all kept it up, maybe forty minutes, before I slipped back to ****, leaving the apathetic and nonchalant garb of the fabricated Russian behind, and reassuming my default disposition. V was in livid disbelief; she had been had — hook, line, and sinker. She was actually pissed. Someone replied crassly, “Damn girl, just because you were thirsty doesn’t mean you have to be mad at us about it.” V logged off.

I felt really bad. Had I...or we, stepped over a line? It seemed harmless to me; we hadn’t insulted her or been intentionally cruel, but she seemed really embarrassed, and lashed out at the cause of it (note from future self: that should have been a flag). None of us really knew what to do. It was late, and after a short conference, came to the same conclusion. We didn’t do anything malicious, she just overreacted. And if she couldn’t take a light-hearted prank, this probably wasn’t the place for her.
Holidays at my parents’ are always rather unremarkable. We aren’t the most festive bunch. No Christmas sweaters or tree-shaped cookies — a dinner Christmas Eve and gifts Christmas Day are the extent of our Yuletide celebrations. For several years we had frozen lasagna for Christmas Dinner and ate on paper plates, after my mom flew off the handle and threw the ham and most of the sides in the trash one Christmas Eve in a fit of rage — that she had done everything and no one helped — despite all of us offering and being refused because she didn’t want to have to “manage anyone and make sure they were doing it the right way”. That was my mom for you.

She flip-flopped between utter control freak and complete absence. I remember her pulling all the towels out of the bathroom cabinet and onto the floor because they weren’t “folded right” — she liked when the band at the end of the towel was on the outside, not the inside. Same dimensions, same ease of use, but that small aesthetic difference made all the difference to her. She once tipped over a bucket of mop water I had, because I put Lysol floor cleaner in it instead of Murphy’s Oil Soap. How the fuck was I supposed to know? You said clean the floor. It didn’t matter if it was done well, or properly, or satisfactorily — it had to be her exact method for everything. Even if her way was inefficient or unnecessary.

The Holidays were an annual reminder of how far from a functional family we were: screaming matches because my dad accidentally bought french-cut green beans, or sweetened-condensed milk instead of evaporated. Those teenage years of Stouffer’s Lasagna Christmases are my best memories of family dinners. For once, no stress, no fights, no bullshit. Green Bean Casserole could get fucked as far as I was concerned, all I wanted the night before Christmas was silence.

The night after the Dima incident, I logged on and saw V down in a channel with her friend Paul, and someone else. I entered and apologized, saying I never meant to make her uncomfortable or upset. She accepted the apology rather begrudgingly, and as I was about to leave in the awkward silence that followed, the stranger in the channel piped up, eager to learn more about me and what had transpired.

His name was...Nick, maybe, and he was actually really funny. He and I got on pretty well, and soon he was telling me about how big a deal he was becoming at his local Chipotle, that he went there seven or ten times a week, and they had stopped charging him extra for guac. A true member of the burrito bowl bourgeoisie. We got lost in there, what was meant to be a quick extending of an olive branch turned into me actually getting to know V, and Nick, and them learning more about me.

V was a year older than me, lived with her parents outside of Miami, and had been modeling since she was sixteen. Word? She asked for my Facebook, so she could show me some of her portfolio and wow, she was gorgeous. At some point we all called it a night, and in the days and weeks that followed, I found myself talking with V more and more. When I got back to ****, I started playing World of Warcraft again; most of my friends had stopped, but V and her friends pulled me back in.

She was a breath of fresh air. She liked the same music as me — shoutout to my emo kids — horror movies, black clothes and macabre things. A real skeleton queen. I hadn’t met anyone like her; I hadn’t met anyone like me. Three semesters in and most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis were dressed like some version of east-coast Vineyard Vines trust fund money. And who was I to judge, I looked like them too. Just like in High School, **** behind his bedroom door and outside it were two different people.

I was walking through life wearing someone else’s clothes, listening to someone else’s music, doing someone else’s homework, and sitting in someone else’s classes. I was thinking about applying to the School of Public Policy. Are you fucking serious? I look back on it now and I wish I could shake that nineteen-year old until something rattled loose. Until he could see being himself was an option, that he wouldn’t be an outcast, he’d be happy.

I was completely allergic to being myself, an anaphylactic shock that would set in, closing my throat, my skin breaking out into hives and pouring sweat. I had fully conditioned myself to feel that me being me — having those possible sharp edges and corners someone might stub their toe on — had to be rounded off. Growing up, people who like what I liked were losers, beta males, deadbeats, burnouts. No-lifes. Lowlifes.

V and I started talking more and more, texting back and forth. We started sharing more of our lives and stories together, staying up until we fell asleep texting or talking on the phone. It was some time in late January I think; I had a plan to go on a Spring Break trip with my roommate and across-the-hall roommate, but someone had something come up and it fell through. I was telling her about it, lamenting the now-boring break to come in cold, wintry **** when she said,

“You can come stay with me if you want.”

Word? I needed to get my shit together. I needed some new clothes. What did this all

mean? Were we... does she...? I guess we’ll find out.

No way was I showing up in Miami looking like some underclassman at a job fair looking for an internship. Most of my wardrobe was old fat clothes, or transitioning fat-to-skinny clothes, a couple half-decent outfits that fit my new body, and the rest were casual, functional, “lazy college kid” couture: ratty sweatshirts and jeans I could trudge to class and work in, never with half a mind to impress anyone.

After coming back from Christmas break, I became somewhat of a social recluse. I (sometimes) went to class, went to work, and went to the gym. Nearly every day for all of them. I have an obsessive personality, and monk-like dedication to my pursuits. I went to the gym and worked out for over one hundred straight days. I didn’t spend money on frivolous things. I was a machine. But now I had to go get on a plane and make some first face-to-face impressions, and it was time to come out of the cocoon.

I had bulked up out of my skinny-fat post-weight-loss phase, and was actually looking pretty damn good somewhere around one hundred sixty-five pounds. I didn’t even know where to go find clothes. When you’re a fat kid, the last thing you want to do is go clothes-shopping — it either means you’re getting fatter and need to go a size up again, or it’s for some special occasion, and you get another reminder from the fashion world that clothes aren’t made to look good on people like you. Needless to say, nine months into my new silhouette, I still had zero interest in fashion. I just bought normal clothes like other people wore. Aggressively average — that’s what I was. That’s what my subconscious kept telling me to be.

I found the male fashion advice subreddit, which linked me to a few places I could find clothes more in line with my inner edgelord.

Leather jacket? Check.

Black jeans? Check.

Plain, neutral shirts? Check.

New sneakers? Check.

Just like that, for the first time, I bought clothes to be seen in. Not to blend in wearing, not to fall in line with what my peers or parents found fashionable. Things that fit, things that had a purpose beyond function. I packed my adidas duffle bag, and headed to the Detroit airport on March 2nd, 2014, not knowing what, or who, was waiting for me on the other side.