My Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Which is worse: Bulimia or the bullshit I feed myself about my fabulous life to come?

My best friend at L.B.J. is probably my other bulimia pal, Donna, the one who won't let us vomit in her bathroom. In the end I believe she likes me for who she thinks I am, remaining drawn for all the time I know her to ambitious people who seem surer of themselves than she. A few months into the school year, I let my hair down and tell her how much I obsess over what people think of me, and how insecure I sometimes feel. We stay friends for years after that but our relationship never really recovers from my telling the truth. What I tell her makes her sick - she tells me so - no small thing when bulimia is a casual part of your life.

During that last year of high school I travel for several weeks to audition for schools in New York and Pittsburgh with my brother Aaron as my chaperone. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York tells me right away, right in the room, that I am accepted. That is in April. I return to Austin to finish the year, and then take Tennis and Government in the summer to finish out the credits I need to graduate early.

I spend that last summer dying in the heat, driving to summer school with my friend Julie Kenner, then Beck, who is now a successful novelist. We hang out at her house eating Kraft Macaroni n' Cheese, the sort of processed food that I am never allowed to eat, so it holds an exotic allure for me. (It occurs to me that I may be the only person on Earth to have ever used the words "exotic" and "Kraft" in the same sentence.)

Julie is very indulgent. A couple of years younger than I, she doesn't interrupt my constant babble about how my life in New York is going to be so fabulous. Years later we live next door to one another in Los Angeles where we sort of grow up together, even though we are already grown-ups.

At night during that last summer in Austin, Julie works crew and I act in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the blazing outdoor heat of August. I play Bottom like a demented Marlon Brando. Every moment, every breath for me is about the future. I live so far outside my body it might as well be astral projection.

My mother is resigned to my going to New York but very ambivalent and sad. She can't understand why I don't stay in Texas where I can probably go anywhere on full scholarship. We have been together properly for only six years and I had to fight so hard to make that happen. Maybe I need to leave so that she can remain my fantasy. In planning for New York and during my first years there, as separation looms, my fetish for her returns with a happy vengeance. We shop at Montgomery Ward for my new kitchen. She buys me clothes. We do coke (just the once). Yet I am impatient for my shiny new life to begin. I am so restless I can hardly sleep, and I walk for hours at night near our house, singing to myself, smoking, and dreaming of New York. No one will be able to hurt me there, because I will become an entirely different, new-and-improved famous person. I have that power. The universe will change just for me. Magic. Always the magic. Like dog shit I can't scrape off my shoe.