69/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

I’m fine. I’m spending the night at Susie’s. I’m busy that day. You look great. It’s not that bad. He’s not interested in me. Yes, I know who that musician/actor/writer/personality is. It was this big, I swear. I don’t know why there are leaves in my hair. I can’t. [silence] Really, I’m fine.

68/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

I have a few friends who tell me stories I’m not sure I really believe because details seem implausible or too dramatic or too coincidental or too—well, something just doesn’t seem right. But mostly I go ahead and believe them or at least pretend to believe them, because for the most part, what’s the harm?

67/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

It doesn’t bother me at all that three kind-beyond-words people I went to school with will be going into my hoarder parents’ house and picking up several pieces of furniture to place in the independent-living-on-the-way-to-assisted apartment and they will see how my parents actually live and then they will know. It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t.

66/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

Beth, who was twelvish, like me, claimed that Donny Osmond, who was seventeenish, was writing her love letters, and she produced them (no envelopes), and let me read them, and his handwriting was remarkably exactly like Beth’s, which is kind of amazing, don’t you think? Donny got married a few years later. Oddly, not to Beth.

65/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

I figured that because I wasn’t a cheerleader, I didn’t have a chance, so I was like the shocked Oscar nominee who doesn’t prepare an acceptance speech when I was elected homecoming queen (no doubt riding the coattails of my hunky football-player boyfriend). The crowd roared, the feedback screeched, the stadium lights bounced off my tiara.

64/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

Caught off guard, I told a guy I was a virgin because it was clearly what he wanted to hear. What I wanted was to at last be in a “normal” relationship, which (spoiler alert!) this one did not turn out to be. That lie haunted me for years, but it turns out it shouldn’t have.

63/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

The last time I saw Heidi and Jon, she whispered that she’d [basically] cheated on him, felt guilty. Then they disappeared. When I found them again, I found Jon first. Hadn’t I heard? They divorced. She was getting remarried Saturday. He had cheated on her. I asked if she had ever cheated. “No,” he said, convinced.

62/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

Someone drove hundreds of miles to deface stop signs around my neighborhood as a revenge move toward the lover who jilted him. He printed stickers with various messages to slap under STOP. This did not endear him to the ex, who threatened a restraining order. I hate that I still see these around. What an asshole.

61/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with someone twice my age. Even today, maybe especially today, it can’t be discussed, because others will choose to define that experience for me and try to tell me what it really was. But that love was mine. And no one gets to tell me it wasn’t.

60/365/Secrets and Lies in 56

My parents are hoarders. It feels like the greatest shame of my life, but it isn’t me. But it also is. Alison and I were pushed out by stuff. The house adds a complicated layer to all the other shit going on. I’ve known for forty years that this would be my problem at the end.