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    I met my junior high school friends on the first day of school in a basement cafeteria where the overhead lights flickered. There was a group of five of them, sitting at the same table, who all lived on Governors Island because their parents were in the Coast Guard. We made the long trek to the island after school and on weekends because it’s the most adult-free place I have ever been. It feels special and secret because I’m not allowed to be there unless one of my friends “sponsors” me—putting me on a list of people allowed to come on the base.
    I don’t think I ever meet one of my friends’ parents and we spend most of our time running around playing manhunt and hanging out at the island bowling alley, which has a Burger King attached to it. Sometimes Jen pretends to get drunk on one beer. I peed my pants! she squeals, though she hasn’t. The rest of us play along though, pretending to lift her up and carry her back home.
    One weekend we decide to take pictures with a disposable camera so we can enter ourselves into a Seventeen magazine modeling contest. We dress in what we think are our nice clothes. I wear jeans and a semisheer flowered top borrowed from a friend, and we take pictures of each other on swings, in the grass, and posed on top of rocks. When we get the pictures back, developed, we laugh at them together but secretly hope ours are maybe not so bad and maybe even the best ones and worthy of submission. One of my friends tells me if my nose wasn’t so fucking big I would win for sure.
    Another weekend we go to San Gennaro’s feast downtown and buy wine coolers from a corner store that we keep in brown paper bags as we walk around. We are twelve.
    We meet a group of boys who are seniors in high school and want our phone numbers even though we tell them we are in seventh grade. Instead they give us theirs, and I write the shortest one’s beeper number on my arm in brown eyeliner from my purse. He tells me his uncle is John Gotti and we feign amazement. I never use his number but I also don’t wash it off for a few days, hiding it from my parents under long sleeves and showing it off to my friends at school. A girl with us that night ends up getting pregnant by one of these men; I’ll hear years later in high school that they maybe got married.
    I don’t tell my friends that one day a week after school I amgoing to acting class, putting on year-end plays like I have every year since second grade. It seems too eager, too uncool.
    I STARTED PERFORMING IN THE THIRD GRADE, A YEAR AFTER MY parents got me into an elementary school on Roosevelt Island—the result of a months-long campaign to have my sister and me transferred out of our shitty zoned school in Queens. The first play we put on was Oliver , and I was cast as both an orphan and “Old Sally,” a character who gives someone a locket at some point. I don’t remember why.
    In the first of three performances, when I got out onstage for my Old Sally lines I realized that I had left the locket on the prop table, where it was outlined with a black marker. And so instead of saying my lines, I stayed mute and didn’t move, didn’t breathe, while the audience laughed. After the laughing died down and it was silent again, a fellow cast member ran offstage to get the locket and came back to bring it to me. Only when the necklace was in my hands, my fingers wrapped around the locket, was I able to speak again.
    I started to get better parts and more lines, which I traced over with yellow highlighter to help me memorize them. By sixth grade I landed a lead: Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie . I was the youngest girl to get the role, and I was supposed to feign sexiness and experience. My big solo required me to rip off a jacket to reveal a fringed and red-sequined short skirt underneath. Igot to wear bright pink lipstick. The choreographer—one of my friends’ mom—whispered in my ear