Coffee Rush is the Palestinian-owned, late-night coffee shop of Tumblr dreams in my hometown. Coffee Rush smells like cigarettes; it is a meeting place for people in suits, people with piercings, people playing Dungeons & Dragons. I once went there right after a wedding, still in my sky-blue bridesmaid dress, a little tipsy. Coffee Rush is the Central Perk of my high school sitcom — it’s the only place open late enough (midnight, to be exact) for all of us to hang out, for the price of a cup of coffee. It beats hanging out on dark playgrounds or parking lots, that’s for sure.

All of my friend groups hang out at Coffee Rush, so I’m there with a different constellation of friends once or twice a week. Sometimes it’s everyone from the Harry Potter group chat, aptly named “Dumbledore’s Army.” Sometimes it’s cross country folks, sometimes it’s people from my We The People class or Spanish, sometimes it’s a funny mix.

I’m on my way to Coffee Rush this evening to hang out with a group of mostly guys who I don’t spend a lot of time with, and I decide to break my own rule, a rule I have not broken once since getting my driver’s license: I’m going to text and drive. Not by accident; not because I see an urgent message at a red light and can’t help myself. I’m sitting in my garage at home, ready to go, and I make the deliberate decision to keep my phone next to me. This will be premeditated: I will text and drive on my way to Coffee Rush tonight. I’ll pull over on the side of the road if I have to. I’ll try to do it at red lights and keep the texts as short as I can without giving myself away. I’m going to break this vow to myself and my family. But this way, Henry will never realize that I’ve left my house, and he won’t realize that I’m hanging out with guys.

I didn’t want to lie to Henry; I felt bad doing so, and I certainly worried about what might happen if he ever found out. To me, it was genuinely supposed to be a benign white lie, a harmless untruth (he didn’t ask what I was doing tonight) that would allow both of us to enjoy our evenings a little more. He wouldn’t love that I was going out and would be too busy to text him, and he certainly wouldn’t love to find out that I was hanging out with guys whose names he didn’t know; his favorite guy friend of mine was gay. I had zero intention to cheat or flirt with any of these guys, all of whom would be moving to different states in just a few short months when we graduated in the spring. It was just… it was just easier if he didn’t know.

This was of course before sharing phone locations and Find my iPhone became a thing, so Henry had to take my word for it as to where I was. I could text him under the table all through the hang, attention always divided, always half-listening to my friends and half-listening to him, grabbing a phone charger from my car if needed (I was always prepared these days). If my phone died, I usually had to text Henry from a friend’s phone to let him know (as if the changing color of the text bubbles from blue iMessage to green SMS wasn’t obvious enough). As texting from another person’s phone tonight would give my secret away, I knew I had to be fully charged and fully prepared. It wasn’t enough to just tell him that my phone had died a few hours later; he had to be updated, and probably apologized to, for letting my phone battery get so low while I was out. I memorized his phone number for just this occasion, and I never forgot it.

Henry and I were usually live-texting, that feeling when the other person is responding so quickly that you’re practically in a live-chat. In the fifteen minutes it would take me to drive down Arizona Avenue to Coffee Rush, he would’ve noticed I wasn’t replying and become upset, and I would have had to bail on my plans to repair with him. He would have said something like, “What, no reply?” followed by “Fine. Goodnight.” To be sure he wouldn’t find out about the outing, I avoided being in any photos that could end up on Facebook or Snapchat. He was across the country, and I still somehow couldn’t quite hide from him.

There’s an old adage about boiling a frog. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it jumps out immediately to save itself, but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it, the story goes that the frog stays put and boils to death; it cannot notice the gradual change.

Of course I didn’t just start texting and driving to keep the peace on day one; that would have been an immediate red flag. Who can’t wait fifteen minutes for a text message? I knew better than that. But it was all slow build and slow burn; it crept up on me. Before they were red flags, they were just… mess-ups. Blips. Accidents. Mistakes. Miscommunications inherent to the medium of dating across technology. All part of the long-distance package. Not red flags. Just… pink ones.

At first, dating long distance as a high schooler was surprisingly the best of both worlds. Here was this pretty amazing guy who could just not get enough of me. I could talk to him constantly and tell him about my entire inner world, but I could also stay busy with homework and friends while he was so far away. Although I did want to cuddle and hang out with him desperately, I was extremely inexperienced, and the opportunity to get to know him without the added pressure of physical intimacy was a huge green light for me. It felt safe.

My mom had warned me time and time again that men often only wanted one thing. She used to recall this Oprah episode all the time where Oprah interviewed two teenagers in a heterosexual relationship separately; the guy was mostly just in the relationship for the moment, enjoying it presently but not thinking about it seriously, while the teenage girl was thinking long-term about their future and possibly marriage. But Henry, all the way out in Wisconsin, evaded that narrative completely. How could he only want me for my body when he lived 2,000 miles, a 31-hour drive (we calculated it), away? He clearly wanted my company for my wit and soul, my humor and perspective. This was a guy who was in it for the long-game. Who dates long-distance for the short term? What is there to gain? He wasn’t like other teenage boys with their carnal needs (which I hardly understood at all, and also, yuck, why do we perpetuate this as the acceptable caricature of young men?!). He was special. He was nerdy but also played football; he liked musicals and played piano; he was more liberal than I and we both shared a passion for LGBTQ rights as we watched same-sex marriage become legalized.

He mailed me his Packers sweatshirt that smelled precisely of him, distinctly Midwestern, and I slept with it every night. We had dates on Skype; once or twice, we even fell asleep together on Skype on purpose. Sometimes, we practiced texting each other in Spanish. I was smitten. He was so good at making it all so… romantic. He had my friend Austen deliver roses to my house on my birthday. He started texting some of my friends, seeming to connect with them. We made group chats.

Still, dating long-distance raised so many digital questions I hadn’t anticipated. I barely understood the dating landscape in real life, let alone online. Should we make it Facebook official (we did) and did that mean anything, really (no?). He would get hurt if he noticed that I was on Facebook (which you can tell by the little green dot on my icon) but hadn’t replied to his text message. So I started going on Facebook less, especially if I wasn’t ready to text him back. If my texts were blue, he had signal, but if my texts turned green his phone was dead, and I’d start to worry. I saw other girls replying to his Tweets; I chose not to create a Twitter account, but I would check his public Twitter if he was giving me the silent treatment, to see what he was sharing with the world. He’d post cryptic song lyrics there, and I wondered if they were left for me to interpret. I checked his Twitter because he almost always posted a picture of me as his Woman Crush Wednesday, which seemed the equivalent of announcing to all his friends at home that he was in love. Read receipts were brutal, so I turned mine off. If he sent the hand making an OK sign emoji (👌) it was his wordless way of saying things were not okay. Instead, it was a sarcastic, “Cool, got it.” And don’t even get me started on the 💔 emoji. These seemingly innocuous digital details began to carry great weight and became the difference between staying up all night fighting and a good night’s sleep. Skype made the long distance easier, but we even miscommunicated about that.

I screenshotted throughout our entire relationship. It started with screenshotting all the extra sweet things he sent me, just to keep them in my phone record and not lose them — after all, we were texting so much that it was hard to go back and scroll endlessly to find old messages. It helped me keep track of details, dates, important things he shared. Sometimes I showed them to my friends; other times, I kept them to myself, to look back on whenever I needed another hit of that fluttery feeling. Without really thinking about it, though, I also screenshotted some of the not so sweet exchanges that we had. For who or what reason, I never was quite sure. But I knew that I wanted to preserve these moments, these memories, even the bad ones, and for the first time in my life, these conversations could be easily frozen in time.

We texted a lot. The conversation that we’d fall asleep having would be immediately picked up in the morning. We exchanged hundreds of texts per day, wrought with inside jokes, memes, links, articles, and quotes. We miraculously never ran out of things to say. It was constant, uninterrupted communication. We probably didn’t go twelve hours without talking to each other for over a year. And that was only if one of us slept for a whole twelve hours.

My friend Austen was also dating someone long distance our senior year of high school. We joked that we were part of a recovery group: ‘AARLDRSG’—Austen and Rachel’s Long Distance Relationship Support Group. Austen, too, felt like the text messaging put strain on him. Austen and I’d sit next to each other in first hour, Photography, and text our boyfriends the entire hour, bags under our eyes from texting them the night before.

At first, I loved this constant communication. I wanted to be inside our little conversational bubble. It was so utterly private and ours. His texts made me smile wide. For a time, I would have rather been texting him than out at coffee or enjoying dinner with my family. Would I rather hear about my dad’s day at the real estate office, or have an attractive young man tell me that I’m beautiful and fascinating? I walked right into the boiling water with my eyes fixed on my glowing screen.

But soon, the ongoing texting, once light and charming, began to feel obligatory. When I asked for a short break from the texting, it wasn’t granted. It was treated like I wanted a break from him. The cue that he was mad was always the word, “Ok.” With a period. If I didn’t reply fast enough, that was how he’d finish the conversation. End of story. My phone was always on loud. I used to set my phone down while I took showers, until he told me that he was texting me from the shower. Then, I started texting him from the shower, too. I even gave him a special ringtone so I’d never miss a text from him. It’s still one of Apple’s ringtones, and it’s a sound that has given me a jump-scare in public more than once in the last decade.

Ignoring a text for too long meant Henry wasn’t important to me, according to him. Especially if something was going wrong for him, I was expected to drop everything and prioritize him, out of love. Not staying up late to finish a conversation signaled to him that I craved sleep more than I valued our relationship. I was always, invariably, having two conversations at once. Texting during dinner at home was off limits, so I’d eat faster and then disappear into my room.

But of course he didn’t mean to be overbearing. It was because that was how much he loved me, how much he wanted us to be together, how much he missed me. He wanted my attention, and I wanted to give it to him. Of course he had to text me, since I was the only girl who understood him. Texting wasn’t the preferred medium, but it was what we had to work with until we could finally move closer together. I was smothered, but I was also smothered in heart emojis, then bear emojis when I started calling him Bear, then this one 🙈, then 🔄which started to symbolize ‘always’ to us.

The texting was my tax, my toll for crossing the love bridge where all the other Forever Couples reside. My love was starting to feel needy, but a very cute, troubled needy man who—in my head—meant well and didn’t realize what he was doing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I did, after all, want to feel needed. It was better than the alternative, a guy who never wanted to hang out, who couldn’t hold a conversation, who only wanted to drink beer and watch football with his friends; the men on TV who grill and complain about their girlfriends, men who just used women for their bodies and then wanted to make crude jokes in the locker room.

Some people, like my parents, started to complain about all of the texting and asked me to get off my phone. Once, we were on vacation at the beach in California and they were begging me to stop texting him, and I told them, simply, that I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. It wasn’t emotionally safe for me to leave my phone. I didn’t play paddle ball with my dad and sister that day. That was just a month before I would move away from home for good.

There was another waving little pink flag that fall when Henry found my Tumblr, a blog where I posted some intimate fanfiction, poetry, photography, feelings. My Tumblr was where I felt safe to voice my angst in private. An outlet, if you will. It was very personal, and very secret, and I had never given him my anonymous username. For those who weren’t 2013 Tumblr girlies—each account gets a personalized url, and handing out your url was the ultimate act of trust. We used pseudonyms and avatars, never our real names or photos. However, through an accidental screenshot that I sent him, Henry captured my Tumblr and went snooping. When he found it, he didn’t tell me that he’d found it. He read through post after post, my embarrassing 60-page Glee fanfiction, the whole works, without telling me a word. He never, ever asked permission to peruse it.

Opening up to Henry weeks later, I admitted to him that I wrote fanfiction. I was super embarrassed about it, so only my closest people knew about it. When I told him, he sheepishly told me that he already knew my secret, that he’d read the whole thing. All sixty pages of Kurt and Blaine falling in love. I was horrified. I felt spied on. That blog was personal. Why not at least tell me he’d stumbled upon it? Where was the transparency? Remember, we are texting 24/7. It’s not like there wasn’t an opportunity for him to say something. Even more scary to me was imagining—what if I had posted about my hurt after we’d had a fight? What if I’d said something on there about him that I didn’t want him to see? Sometimes I’d used the blog as an outlet during our fights, a place I might write about my throbbing teenage pain. I had come close to posting about him, but somehow even breathing those thoughts onto the world wide web would make it seem too real, too concrete. I didn’t want to leave a trace of evidence.

That gut reaction—knowing I had almost posted about the pain I was experiencing with him and thanking God I hadn’t—that didn’t feel good. Henry, out of respect, should have never read my diary—no matter the medium. But at the same time, feeling scared about what would happen if Henry did read my most close-to-the-chest thoughts should have been a check-engine light pinging on. Because why did I have so much boyfriend-related angst in the first place? Documenting our relationship was a double-edged sword. Write it and make it real (and traceable) or hide it and it ‘didn’t exist.’ I didn’t know where to put these feelings and questions; who to talk to but Austen who might understand what it felt like to be tangled in a messy, long-distance, mostly-texting relationship.

Later, I would write these feelings in pen on my legs where the words could be washed off and never seen again.

The whole Tumblr encounter left a bad taste in my mouth, but it wasn’t a big enough deal for me to make a huge stink. I couldn’t articulate why it felt so much like betrayal — I was posting publicly online after all. It was just the Tumblr culture, the Tumblr etiquette. I knew it was wrong in a gut way but it didn’t sound that bad when I said it out loud. Because of this, it wasn’t like I could exactly explain to my mom why this interaction had hurt my feelings. Try as she might, she wouldn’t understand what a Tumblr url was or why I was posting my angst on the internet in the first place. It wasn’t relatable to her. It felt like there wasn’t an adult who could empathize, let alone realize that something might be wrong.

As a young woman, I was raised to be a peacekeeper, not an instigator. To find the best in people. To forgive. So in the Tumblr instance, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He knew I wasn’t happy that he’d found it, but I left it at that. I said to myself, maybe he was just curious. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he’d meant to tell me. After all, I’m the one who leaked my account via screenshot. It wasn’t that bad. And the Glee fanfic was kinda awesome, if I do say so myself.

I soon learned that he, too, had a Tumblr account. I was never granted permission to see it. There was no tit-for-tat. He got to keep his secrets, and I did not. These double standards scratched at my sense of fairness and made things start to feel unequal between us.

Eventually, I deleted that Tumblr account completely. There was no point to it, anymore, when I felt like he was watching everything I did. I remember wondering to myself if true love meant you never kept anything from your beloved. If he wanted to go through my phone someday, would I let him? Could there be no secrets between us?

Later, I sent this text message to my friend Emma:

“note. you do not have to read this. in fact, i discourage it. but i have nowhere else to say things now that i dont have tumblr so...*

Emma i swear to god i have bipolar disorder or something.

WHY.

i seriously can go from having the best day to just hating everything. you should read the poem i just wrote, because i can’t rant on tumblr anymore and i definitely can’t rant on facebook”

The watery flag of texting-the-love-of-his-life-too-much waved sadly next to this new little flag: Tumblr secrecy. Individually, the flags were pink, translucent. Taken individually, they never seemed all that concerning, wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows. It wasn’t until I would layer them, years later, putting one flag on top of the other, that they slowly started to become opaque: a brilliant, blood-red flag.

But having to sit next to him every day, I gave myself permission to relax bit by bit for the sake of my education. I was always an A student, I wasn’t going to just not participate. Spending time in the same room as him grew to be more manageable. Eventually small talk inevitably blossomed in the cracks of lecture. He asked me how my family was. Then we worked together on an assignment. I asked him where he was applying for college. He explained a concept to me.

At this point we had been broken up for about two and a half years. During that time I had developed a close relationship with my sisters and parents, was swim captain, had gotten into my dream college, was proud of who I’d become.

I thought I wanted to pretend he wasn’t there, but I realized I was actually liking it better that he could see me now—that he could see me succeeding.

Throughout our relationship, Henry had lots of ideas for how I should change. My clothes, my makeup, my friends, my love for my family—it all had to go. For instance, as an only child, he thought it was strange that I was so close with my sisters. Up until that point, I had always considered my sisters my “built-in friends,” but Henry insisted that it was sad that I needed “built-in friends” and couldn’t make “real friends.”

I genuinely believed that he knew what was best for me, so I tried my hardest to create distance with my sisters and spend time with who he'd decided counted as real friends. Then whenever I brought him around my friends, he stayed absurdly quiet, never gave them anything to work with. Later when we’d be alone he’d give me his reasons why it would be best if I didn’t see them anymore. He’d tell me that spending time with them would lead me down a path of becoming like them: alcoholics-to-be with bleak futures.

It wasn't just my sisters and my friends, though. Henry’s insights always had a way of peeling back the layers of the people I respected and trusted. Particularly adults. Until I met Henry, I’d always kind of accepted adults’ general authority without question because, well, they were the adults. But Henry made me see things differently. He pointed out that adults weren’t always right, that they weren’t infallible. That I shouldn’t be so naive as to blindly trust them just because they had authority over me.

Even more specifically, the adults Henry was most critical of were my parents. My mom was the classic “almond mom.” She was thin in that way that looked like it took effort, always filled our pantry with foods that were low-fat-low-carb-low-calorie, read nutrition labels like they held scripture. With the best of intentions, she always pushed her beliefs about diet culture and thinness onto my sisters and me, thinking it was wisdom she was passing down. Her values weren’t entirely her fault; they were very much the result of the Western beauty culture she was shaped by. But still, I can’t deny that it had a major impact on my perception of myself and the world around me.

My dad, on the other hand, struggled with an alcohol addiction. Growing up, he’d sip straight liquor over ice from morning until night, often peppering his daily haze with prescription anxiety meds to get through the day. It was normal for him to have no recollection of weekday evenings. My sisters and I would drag him to bed after we’d find him passed out on the floor and learned to set up his CPAP machine that he used at night for sleep apnea.

I knew he was an alcoholic prior to Henry pointing it out to me, but what I hadn’t noticed was how pervasive his alcoholism was in my upbringing and home life. Honestly, I’d never known anything different. It was the same with my mom’s eating habits—I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t see her obsession with her weight or looks as anything unusual. I just assumed that all adults were like that. I also assumed that all adults drank every day. The picture of adulthood that I created in my head consisted of coffee, P90X, Whiskey Manhattans, and Klonopin.

I was surprised to learn that not only did Henry’s parents not drink every day, but they rarely drank at all. They also didn’t take pills for anxiety. And they kept chocolate ice cream in the house.

Henry did not like my parents, and he made a point of consistently highlighting their flaws to me. He warned that if I was not careful I would become like them, and I took his words to heart. As he unveiled my parents’ struggles to me, I couldn’t help but question what else about life I might have overlooked. Seeing my parents through this new lens, I felt a surge of shame and became increasingly critical of them. Growing up I had always been close to them, had always been open with them. But soon I found myself intentionally distancing myself from these two people who, I can see now, were just doing their best with what they'd been given.

Henry began to meticulously point out issues with the people in my life: my sisters, my parents, and my friends, one by one. I found some validity in his criticisms of my parents, so it made genuine sense to me that he would have an insight into these other people too that I just couldn’t see. He told me that with his guidance, he could rescue me from the impending disaster that adulthood apparently held for me: a future marked by anorexia and alcoholism. A future where no one could possibly love me, he’d say. So I allowed him to cut people from my life at his discretion. In fact, I aided and abetted. Maybe that’s why women and girls don’t talk about becoming prey—because first, we walk willingly into their traps. But he seemed to know Everything, while I could only hope, meekly, to one day achieve even a fraction of his brilliance.

My sense of his superiority wasn’t limited to private conversations; trustworthy people in my life painted him as someone who had the answers, someone who could guide me when they couldn’t. I remember mentioning to my biology teacher that I was interested in taking AP biology the following year. While she cautioned me about the course’s difficulty, she added, “But wait, you’re dating Henry, right? He can help you, you’ll be okay,” despite the fact that I was acing every test without his help. I didn’t enroll in AP bio for the next year.

Teachers and peers who knew him seemed to think more highly of me when they learned I was his girlfriend. If he approved of me, then they did, too. He was gifted, he was golden, he was brilliant. And I was the supposed winner.

Henry wielded a power over me that I struggled to put into words. With each idea he implanted in my mind, I began to doubt my own instincts. I felt as if my worldview had been so sheltered prior to him that I needed him now to show me everything I had missed.

But soon he started to dangle our relationship out on a little string, barely within reach, and continuously threatened to cut it if I failed to live up to his standards. He was always just on the edge of abandoning this charitable role he had assumed in my life.

He started imposing rules on me, claiming that I needed to follow them if I wanted to stay with him. Which, of course I did—I needed him to save me, I thought, and beyond that I thought I’d never find a guy so perfect ever again. His first rule was that I had to respond to his texts immediately. In the early days of texting culture, I didn’t see this as much of a problem. He wanted me to prove that I cared about him, that I could be dependable. I convinced myself that I could do that for him. I thought it was kind of sweet, actually.

Soon some of Henry’s peak coercion began to come through in the form of a girl I would never meet: Carly. She had a looming, lingering presence in the background of our relationship. I never knew her last name or had any idea what she looked like, but she was a girl who had been in Henry’s life for a while, and he was romantically interested in her.

This wasn’t a conclusion I had arrived at through speculation; Henry outright told me. He told me that my failure to live up to his standards had caused him to develop a wandering eye. He repeatedly told me that I kept “messing up.” He’d often tell me, verbatim, “you need to be perfect.” Perfection, of course, was an impossible standard to attain, but I thought I needed him, so I had to try.

I did feel some jealousy toward Carly, underneath the guilt. Was he nice to her? I wondered if she only saw his good side, if she got to befriend the version of him that I wished I was dating. I knew they talked often, texting and calling each other, discussing me. I couldn't help but be jealous that she got to know him without ever having to earn it, without a list of rules to follow.

But still, I rose to the challenge, sacrificing any trace of the person I had been prior to him. All friends, family, and relationships that I had abandoned were mere casualties lost to a greater good. Just a few months into our relationship and he already had so many rules I needed to follow that I could never get them right. He’d have me redo my makeup before an outing, maybe change my clothes too. Then I didn’t text back fast enough. I’d talk too much and it was annoying, then later I didn’t talk enough and it was weird. I didn’t text back fast enough. I let my little sister answer the phone when he called and he was so pissed that he swore at her. My friends were too loud and it was embarrassing. I didn’t fucking text back fast enough.

I couldn’t keep up, new rules were being added daily. I had such a hard time remembering them all that I started to keep a list in my phone. I had to—because above all else, his number one rule was that I had to remember every single thing he said. I told him I was trying. I was trying so hard. He said trying wasn’t enough, I had to actually do it. He said he couldn’t understand how this could be so hard for me if I actually loved him like I said I did.

He probably wouldn’t have admitted that they were “rules” per se, but I kept track of what I did that upset him so I could avoid repeating my mistakes. And every rule had a caveat: text back within two minutes, but triple check it so you don’t say something wrong. Don’t let your sisters answer the phone for you, but you absolutely cannot miss the call.

I couldn’t go a single day without “messing up.”

If I made any mistake, whether it be taking too long to text back or making a new dumb friend, he would respond with silent treatments that lasted days, often making me guess what I did wrong. Of course, this silence was unbearable for me because I had cut out so many people that he was the only person I talked to most days.

During his bouts of silence, I was still expected to text him continuously, even if he gave one-worded responses, even if he gave no response at all. He also expected me to still walk with him in the hallways at school and spend the evenings at his house, even if he refused to talk to me the entire time—sitting a foot apart on his basement couch, some show playing that neither of us was watching.

The silence was maddening. More often than not I had no idea which of his rules I violated, and there was always the possibility that I made a brand new mistake that created a new rule. Our “fights” were usually him being mad at me over some unknown cause, and me pleading with him to forgive me, guessing at what I might have done this time to disappoint him, repeatedly apologizing.

Deep down I questioned if this was normal in a relationship, so I kept his rules and his anger a secret from everyone—ashamed that I entertained it. Instead of speaking up, I hung onto a dirty hope that one day everything would just… click. I thought soon I’d stop making mistakes, his rules would become second nature. This won’t last forever, because I’ll figure it out, I thought. My existence was deflating, my sense of self shrinking. But I thought he was The One, and I was so lost in the idea of making myself worthy of his love that I didn’t notice I was disappearing in the process.

Spoiler alert: it never “clicked.” He tortured me until the day I left him.

Sitting next to him now, I found that being around him didn’t need to make me feel small—instead it could make me feel powerful, capable. I was thriving, and he couldn’t take any of the credit. I had flourished despite how horribly he treated me.

Not to be dramatic, but I rose from the ashes he left me in like a goddamn phoenix.

When Henry and I were dating, he spent so much time and energy trying to change me that he never actually got to know the real me. Now as I sat next to him in class, I was the version of myself that he missed out on… and I knew it. I took any and every opportunity to flaunt my confidence, my freedom.

Once when we were dating I wore high heels to school and he was pissed. He wanted me to change into my gym shoes or even a spare pair of his own shoes. Now that I was out of his grasp, I wore the heels as I pleased—and I wore them right in front of him. I made it my goal to show him that none of his rules had stuck, and I hoped it was eating him alive.

I remember getting ready together for a school dance our sophomore year and he decided I was wearing too much makeup, told me I looked like a whore. He demanded that I wash it all off before meeting up with our friends. I still remember how he stood behind me at the bathroom sink, my face a slick mess of tears, makeup remover, and mascara. His hungry eyes met with mine in the mirror—glaring to ensure my obedience, feasting on my groveling for forgiveness. We met up with our friends that evening, and I smiled for pictures like nothing happened.

Never again, I told myself. Now I wore jet-black winged eyeliner unapologetically.

I’d casually mention parts of my life that he blatantly hated or had tried to keep me from. I was close with my parents and sisters. I was still friends with the same “loud” girls. I went on dates, there were guys who were interested in me, despite Henry’s insistence that no one could ever love me as I was.

Not many people get the chance to rub their growth and happiness in the face of their toxic ex in person, and let me tell you—it felt damn good.

Henry and I had never been in a class together before because, as he used to love to remind me, he was more advanced than me in every subject (except Spanish—until just this moment, I was always a course ahead). I thought it was fairly unlikely that we’d cross paths again in our high school careers. He was barely on my radar, that was on purpose. That chapter of my life involving him had been definitively closed and locked in a vault.

There’s a particular kind of sadness reserved for versions of yourself you don’t want to keep. I had buried mine deliberately, two years in the ground. And I believed—the way you believe things you need to be true—that it would stay there. I had built an entire life on top of it: new routines, new joy, a new version of myself that I was proud of. I thought that was recovery.

But now he was here.

He was already seated, slouched low with that same easy posture I used to know so well. It was the first class that Henry and I ever had together. I hadn’t talked to him since our sophomore year.

My heart dropped into my stomach, churning up something like nausea. I was afraid to be so close to him. I hated being in the same room as him, and I didn’t want him to look at me. I underestimated how I’d respond to being near him, how deeply rooted was my fear of him. I had spent so much time attempting to rid myself of the scars he gave me, and I thought it was unfair that the universe could just dump me in the same room as him. The wounds he left me with were beginning to sting, like they were threatening to reopen. I couldn’t simply ignore it, ignore him, like I presumed I would.

I found my desk—assigned seats, so at least I didn’t have to choose—and settled in with just my binder and a pencil (backpacks had been banned at my high school since freshman year). Around me, other students filtered in with the loud, overlapping energy of a first day. Comparing schedules, groaning about early classes, laughing too hard at nothing. Our teacher, a middle-aged woman who was a little too enthusiastic about teaching Spanish to a class of mostly white Midwestern kids who’d never use it, wrote the day’s agenda on the whiteboard, unbothered by the noise. Henry was two rows over and one seat up. Close enough that I could see the edge of his profile without turning my head, close enough that there was no version of this class where I could pretend he wasn’t there.

Then he spoke—not to me, but generally—and tears reflexively burned behind my eyes. It was the first time I’d heard his voice in almost two years. It was deep and pretentious, his words buttery in his vocal fry. When I heard it that day in class, I felt it cut into my chest like a dagger, leaving behind a deep ache…a familiar pain. It was agony, it was heartache. It was a visceral emotional pain.

I was unprepared—I thought about him as little as possible over the past two years. We went to a big school, I really didn’t have to go out of my way to avoid him. We had a large cafeteria, the hallways were always crowded. We had entirely different friend groups.

Anxiety washed over me. My mind spun as my breaths became shallow—oxygen seemingly scarce. I felt my heart pound in my throat and ears. In my head, memories of his voice replayed. Do as I say, not as I do. You need to be perfect. I’m doing this because I love you.

The ache in my chest followed me into my next class. And the next. Then to my dismay and utter bewilderment, I found I had another class with Henry. Two classes. Fuck.

The ache in my chest followed me home, and I woke up with it the next morning. Nightmares came back with a vengeance. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, start the day with my heart pounding. I was afraid to be in class, and I didn’t want to participate. I didn’t want him to hear me speak. I didn’t want his attention to land on me for even a second. I had already spent so much time and energy escaping his grasp, his gaze, his judgment—I would not subject myself again to his control.

The teachers praised him in every class. He was always the top student. He made witty comments, made it obvious that he understood the course material with minimal exposure to it. He claimed to never know when it was exam day, but aced each one every time. Teachers ate it up. I found out that we were in the same level of Spanish now because he tested out over the summer, allowing him to skip a year of the Spanish curriculum and landing him a spot in the most advanced Spanish course our school had to offer, Spanish V, with me. Though he had been a year behind the class until now, he was still among the best Spanish speakers in our class, if not the best. He texted during class, right out in the open where teachers could see it, but they never batted an eye. I heard stories of how he played Pacman on his phone every day through AP Physics but still aced every assignment. Our AP Microeconomics teacher insinuated that he would one day become a doctor.

I had spent two years carrying the knowledge of who he really was, and I felt like no one wanted to hear it. He had it all put together, and I was just a girl who used to date him. Somewhere along the way, that had quietly become the whole story. So when senior year started, and I found myself back in a room with him, I wasn’t just afraid of my own memory. I was afraid of how alone I was going to be inside it.

Often after a breakup, people in your life finally speak up and tell you about all the things they didn’t like about your significant other. People say things like, “I always thought you could do better,” or, “I noticed he’s a really bad tipper…”

That didn’t happen with Henry.

Instead, people who knew nothing of his unforgiving side seemed to think I was an idiot for leaving him. Like I’d had the trophy and given it up. I saw how people admired him, but his performance made me nauseous. Don’t fall for it. He’s evil. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. Shout it over the loudspeaker. Put flyers in everyone’s locker.

His brains, accomplishments, and charisma were celebrated continuously, and I remained quiet. I felt so small, like the harm he caused me meant nothing. My entire concept of self had been mangled beyond recognition by his words and actions—but there wasn’t a scratch on him. He was thriving while I spent my days and nights reliving all the ways I had been hurt and violated. I spent all my emotional energy searching for a way to relieve myself of the tightness I felt in my chest.

I still don’t know exactly where it started to go wrong. But I do know exactly where it started.

I met Henry our freshman year, so innocently, at a school dance. I remember that Friday in September 2010, standing in front of my bathroom mirror with my dark brown hair straightened and parted off center, second guessing my decision to attend the dance at all. My friends had already decided not to go—they’d heard through the grapevine that it was supposed to be pretty lame. I’d find out soon that they were right.

I don’t remember what compelled me to attend anyway, but then later in the evening there I was—alone and awkward in the high school cafeteria in a time before you could hide your face in a smartphone. Going to my first high school dance solo was definitely out of character for me. Not to mention way out of my comfort zone.

With tables and chairs pushed to the periphery to clear a space for a makeshift dance floor, the freshmen were herded into the middle of the room and instructed to sit on the floor. The dance was called “Freshman Frenzy”—explicitly for freshmen, though run by upperclassmen—which was precisely why my friends didn’t want to go. The upperclassmen were giving some kind of speech echoing sentiments of “Welcome to high school!” and “Best years of your life!” and “Are you ready to dance?” But honestly, I couldn’t tell you what was said. My attention was captured elsewhere.

I’d been in the same school district just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin since I moved here in the first grade, so I was familiar with almost every face around me. I’d spent nearly a decade with these people. But there, at the edge of the crowd, was someone I didn’t recognize—a beautiful someone.

A few feet away from me, he sat on the floor of the dimly lit room, knees slightly bent, arms casually draped over them. His hazel eyes were pensive as he rightfully gave his attention to the upperclassmen. His white T-shirt contrasted with his summer tan. He had spikey blonde hair.

I knew pretty much everyone my age in the room, or at least knew their faces. So if I didn’t recognize this guy, he had to be new to the district. He probably didn’t know anyone here, either. When the speech hit a lull, I saw my chance. I leaned over and asked him what his name was, noting aloud that I didn’t recognize him.

He said his name was Henry. He was part of a cohort of students that transferred from a nearby private school. Our exchange was quiet and fleeting, we were cut off by the upperclassmen’s spiel. As music swept the room and the freshmen started to slowly diffuse throughout the cafeteria, I couldn’t help but notice that Henry seemed to know more people than I did. He wasn’t standing alone anymore—he was already talking to a group of other kids, effortlessly mingling.

Granted, some of the people from the nearby private school—who Henry probably grew up with—were at the dance too (somehow, I’d overlooked those unfamiliar faces). But the school year had already begun, and it was clear that Henry had found his footing in this new environment. He was seamlessly connecting with classmates, forming bonds with people I only knew by name. Then I noticed that we had a mutual friend—a guy from my science class. When he seemed to have a free moment, I saw my chance and tactically made my move, approaching him to strike up a conversation.

I set myself a goal: I wanted to get Henry’s number by the end of the night. I figured if I started talking to the dude from science it might draw Henry over, and to my delight, my plan worked pretty quickly. Henry wandered over to join our conversation, chatting with his friend—and by extension, me. The three of us hung out for a bit, but as more people drifted into our circle, Henry and I slipped to the side, pulling away from the crowd so we could just talk to each other.

I felt pretty clever. I really pulled it off—I’d gone to the dance on my own and, by the end of the night, I had a cute guy’s number in my pocket like a little trophy.

The idea of having a high school boyfriend had me practically buzzing. So a month later when Henry asked me to be his girlfriend on October 17th, 2010, I answered with an enthusiastic YES and just like that, in the classic high-school way, it was official. Word got around, and several girls at school approached me to tell me how lucky I was to be with him. It felt surreal. I wouldn’t say I was necessarily unpopular, but normally people weren’t that interested in my love life. I quickly noticed that dating Henry put a spotlight on me. It turns out, “Henry’s Girlfriend” was a coveted spot. In the beginning, I really did feel lucky.

Sitting through another miserable Spanish class en silencio, callaita, “luck” was the last word I’d use for him coming into my life. Someday I’d look back trying to pinpoint the exact moment things changed, and never quite find it. That’s the part that still gets me: there was never a turn. It felt like fate, right up until it didn’t.

My high school bedroom is painted two alternating shades of purple, but the walls are grayscale as I get ready long before dawn. Much to my mother’s chagrin, I’d joined the cross country team my senior year now that I can finally drive myself to school (she loves me but she simply cannot be getting up this early). You see, since Arizona afternoons are unbearable for running, practice is every day before school.

The first bell rings at 7:20 am, so practice starts at a brutal 5:15 am.

I drive the maroon Honda Civic way too fast, cutting an essential three minutes off my usual ten-minute drive and blur into the parking lot near the track just in time. It’s still dark. My phone is quiet; I’ve had this iPhone for about one year now, a huge upgrade from the EnV2 flip phone I’d been using since middle school. It makes sense that my phone isn’t buzzing yet. Almost everyone I know is still asleep, and even though I’m two hours behind Wisconsin time, where a certain someone I’ve been talking to lives, even he isn’t awake just yet. It’ll be a little bit. My heart skips a beat; I have to take a deep breath and try not to break out into an embarrassingly huge smile. My certain someone.

I already know exactly what he’s going to send me. He does it every single morning. My Daily Odd Compliment of the day. Even though I knew he was pulling them from the internet, I couldn’t help but feel like each one was perfectly hand-picked for me, each one making me feel uniquely connected to him.

They looked like this:

Like clockwork, while I was in the locker room after another incredible sunrise run, endorphins pumping through me to the laughter of the other girls sitting in front of the floor-length mirror with all assortment of curling and flat irons plugged dangerously into overloaded outlets, his text came. Like clockwork.

And so began our usual day of smiling at our phones like idiots. Texting through my first class, Photography III with Mr. McKinnon, was easy; we all sat behind huge Mac computers, and he didn’t much care if we were on our phones as long as our Friday Faves were good. He let us chug coffee in that class too, bless him.

Throughout the day, Henry knew which classes I had to go for and which classes I could get away with texting in. Phone down if I had an exam, always accompanied by a “good luck!” message. Even though many seniors chose half-days, I was an overachiever, so I didn’t get out of school until 2:14 pm. And then I was home free to text him all afternoon long, crossing and uncrossing my legs as I lie on my bed in my wonderfully purple room, alternating between homework and sending the little monkey emoji that’s covering its eyes, in a perpetual state of blushing.

I grew up in Chandler, Arizona, a sprawling suburb of the acquired taste that is Phoenix. I once read on Forbes.com that Chandler was one of the top ten most boring cities in America. I guess I could see that, although it seems more and more developed every time I go back to visit. It’s a middle- to upper-middle-class 250,000-person blanket of identical stucco houses surrounded by artificial ponds that turn greenish in the summer, and nothing but strip malls in between. It’s mostly desert, with a big, air-conditioned shopping mall and four enormous public high schools. My childhood was classically suburban: the dog, the mown lawn, the holidays, the soccer mom, the breadwinning father, the occasional family road trips to Disneyland.

In high school, I was kind of golden. I almost mean that literally, since I had sun-kissed blonde hair and bronze, tanned skin from seasons of high school tennis and cross country, but I mostly mean it figuratively: I was on top of my game. I took all AP classes and outscored my studious male peers in advanced math. In sports, I played hard with a competitive streak. Every report card was a neat row of straight A’s. At 6:30 am every Sunday morning for four years, I volunteered at a local dog shelter, taking abandoned pups on walks as the sun rose over the desert in Gilbert. Extracurriculars? Try Model United Nations, National Honor Society, and Speech and Debate. I got my driver’s license on the first try the day I turned sixteen. Nerd though I may have been, I also went to almost every Friday night football game, dressing to the night’s next ridiculous theme. I made it to Homecomings and Proms, always proud that I’d thrifted my dress at Ross Dress For Less for $17.00. I was well-liked, productive, humble, and happy; never popular, but never unpopular, either. By all definitions, successful. At the end of my junior year of high school, I won Student of the Year in a class of over 800 pupils. People wrote, “You’re going to change the world,” in my yearbooks.

And I was single. I’d always been single.

Frankly, dating had always seemed a little scary but mostly distracting from everything I had going on. If I wasn’t babysitting, volunteering, hitting tennis balls, riding my pink Ripstik around the neighborhood with Maddi, taking pictures for photo class, watching Glee, or gossiping at Coffee Rush, I had my nose buried in an AP U.S. History textbook. While in hindsight I may have intimidated some of the guys at my high school, the truth was that they intimidated me. Sex, boys, love—they weren’t really on my radar. They were part of a wide and scary unknown. It felt like the only love stories I could really enjoy were those so fantastical that they couldn’t be real, like Twilight. I was asked to a couple of dances, and I said no every time. The nerves just weren’t worth it. I wouldn’t have known what to do with my hands, when to lean in for the kiss; or worse, what if he leaned in but I wasn’t ready? Besides, my mother had warned me that most guys wanted only one thing, and that made them scary to me. I had to find the right guy, the guy who would never do that in a million years. And I believed he was out there.

Really, the equation was simple: get good grades to get into a good college. My family is highly educated, so I felt a budding pressure to get into an out-of-state school, even vying for the acceptance of an Ivy League college like my cousins. Every evening I studied until at least midnight, and every morning my alarm got me up early for either my extra ‘zero hour’ class at 6:30 am or cross country practice, which started even earlier. There wasn’t time for flirting, and I wasn’t mad about it, because I also didn’t know how to flirt. Those were the days when phrases like, “I am a strong independent woman who don’t need no man,” were popularized, and I was feeling confident (and let’s be honest, safe) in my solitude. After all, I’d basically always been single—I didn’t know the difference. Albeit small, there was a jealousy of my girlfriends who held hands with their boyfriends at school. I just figured that would happen to me later, when I had time for it, when he was the one. I wanted it to be like the movies: I wouldn’t have to date, breakup, heartbreak over and over again: I’d just wait for the one and I’d be set for life. Like the adults had told me vaguely: when it was right, I would just know.

I had another data point, too; my parents are as close to soulmates as you can get in this life, and they didn’t meet until they were both in their mid-thirties. The idea of meeting my high school sweetheart wasn’t hanging over my head. I figured love would take its time.

If you really want to count it, I dated a guy named Sam in the 6th grade, which mostly looked like whispering to my friends about him on the playground. I think we held hands, like, once. And I did kiss Tyler after a Friday night football game my sophomore year of high school, but I quickly got cold feet and ended it overnight. I entertained the idea of dating Brandon for a while my junior year, but he was busy with Les Miserables rehearsals and church, and it fizzled. We kissed (with tongue, which was major) in my car in his church parking lot one night. And that was it—you’re caught up on the entire extent of my dating life by age seventeen. Two kisses. One “boyfriend” on the elementary school playground. I was inexperienced, to say the least.

Inexperience created a positive feedback loop; I hadn’t tried anything, so I might not be a good kisser, so I won’t kiss anyone, and thus, remain a perpetually bad kisser. Forever. Breaking that cycle was going to take a brand of courage I hadn’t quite developed yet. No guy had been worth the bravery, yet.

Toward the end of my junior year, my English teacher announced that students could apply to attend an out-of-state conference for high school students over summer called the World Affairs Seminar. As a chronic overachiever, my ears naturally perked up. Resume-builder, you ask? I applied, and was accepted, and a Rotary-funded plane ticket was secured for my attendance at the 2013 World Affairs Seminar in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Truthfully, I wasn’t too keen on attending a faraway, educational seminar with strangers during one of my few precious weeks of summer vacation, but the way it would look on my college applications was convincing. I sort of applied on autopilot before I realized what I was actually agreeing to. I’d never been to Wisconsin and frankly didn’t think it sounded like a very desirable place to be. Mostly, I imagined beer and dairy cows. It was probably cold there. The seminar sounded lame, and I tried to change my mind about going as the weeks crept up on me. I remember sprawling on the living room couch, begging my mom if I could back out. But following through on commitment was a strong value to my parents, who rarely let me quit anything. She told me I needed to go—and reminded me that it could even be fun. I understand the lesson they were trying to teach me, about following through on promises, but I also think that the lesson backfired over time.

Sometimes you have to quit that which isn’t serving you.

I remember being in the boarding line at the airport and waving back to my mom with a frown on my face, a pillow tucked under my arms, the other three WAS nominees from Arizona high schools nearby. Don’t make me go, I mouthed to her, half-joking.

If only we’d known.

WAS turned out to be a summer-camp-like weeklong takeover of Carroll University. As serious as this seminar wants to be with its tagline, “Building Strong International Leaders For A Better Tomorrow,” we were still 300 high school students loose on a college campus with only college-aged counselors in charge of corralling us. There were sprawling green lawns, enormous lecture halls with fine acoustics, boys’ and girls’ dormitories, a college cafeteria, and lots of dark corners, hallways, and places to get lost. Plenty of space, in short, for drama, gossip, and romance between solving the global issues of our time.

Each year, a theme is selected for the week. In the greatest of ironies, the theme of the 2013 World Affairs Seminar I attended was Gender Equity and Social Justice.

A number of speakers were organized to present. Wendy Baumann talked to us about the ability to empower women financially through micro-lending; Geneva Johnson discussed the intersection between race, gender, and identity; Sahar Maher El-Issawi spoke of gender issues in the Middle East and her personal escape from hardship; Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau spoke to gender equity the U.S. military. This was my first real introduction to “feminism.” My seventeen-year-old jaw dropped; it was a paradigm-shifting, which-way-is-up kind of week for me.

Only a few weeks before the conference, a guy at school had accused me of being a feminist. I didn’t actually know what a feminist was, not really, but his tone of voice told me it wasn’t anything good, so I quickly told him I wasn’t one. I had to pretend like I both knew what a feminist was and that I was a Cool Girl™ who could hang with the bros. As far as feminism went, the only thing that came to mind was some kind of feminazi who believed women were superior to men; I was all about equality, so I couldn’t be a feminist.

By the end of the conference, I was definitely a feminist.

Between the speakers, there was an elaborate itinerary that included recreational time, small groups, a dance, trivia night, a talent show, karaoke, morning exercises, skits, and of course, mealtimes in the dining hall. We were meant to mingle. I got to know the other students really well. I still keep in touch with some of the students from the group, and even bought one girl’s first novel. For only a short week together, we made some surprisingly intense and lasting relationships.

And there amongst the supposed leaders of tomorrow was a brilliant, handsome, equally golden teenage boy from just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And he wanted to sit by me.

I met Henry on the very first night. In fact, we ate our very first meal there together, smooshed into half-sitting in a windowsill in the cafeteria because our table was so crowded. From my point of view, he was incredibly attractive—skinny but muscular, cool clothes, windswept dirty-blonde hair. He had a handsome face, strong arms, big hazel eyes, a comforting voice, a good laugh. I had a crush on him almost immediately. The dude was classically hot in the eyes of an eleventh-grade white girl.

Very rarely did the people I had a crush on like me back, so the fact that we got on so well, that we played hangman in the back of the lecture halls and sat together at every meal and texted whenever the boys and girls had to split up, was totally new for me. Normally, my crushes were fleeting. I liked boys so I could have something to add to late-night conversations at sleepovers, not to actually act on them. Every year that I’d gone to summer camp since I’d been thirteen years old, I’d had a crush on some boy, nothing ever happened, and every year I went home to never see that boy again. These crushes were purely for entertainment.

Henry was a seemingly safe, low-risk person to crush on. We could flirt for the week, and then he would go home to Green Bay and I would fly back to Arizona, and he would just be a pretty boy I giggled with while learning about feminism. I could talk about him to the girls on the tennis team back home, but it would always just be a story of the one who got away. A Grease-like summer romance, without all the getting friendly down in the sand.

Outside of my hometown, surrounded by other young nerds, I found myself kind of popular. A cute boy was interested in me. Henry followed me around like a puppy. It’s hard to emphasize how intoxicating that feels after watching your high school crushes ask other girls to the dances for the last three years. Henry and I were the unspoken leaders of our small crew. Having always been used to watching from the outside, I lavished shallowly in this newfound drama and excitement. It was so new. I had never been this girl. The other girls would tap me, giggling. “Ohhh, look who’s coming over to say hello.” Peels of laughter. And there was Henry, across the street, looking at us sheepishly with his hands in his pockets, a half-smile on his face.

The flirting continued throughout the week. Henry and I made inside jokes about how I’d somehow lost at hangman after guessing a whopping twenty-nine letters, a whole three more letters than exist in the English alphabet. I secretly blamed it on how overcome I was by just his warm body sitting next to mine. He played a Chris Brown song on the piano at the talent show, and I swooned. Cora squeezed my leg just as he came on; it seemed like he was singing just for me. The whole week, you couldn’t find us apart. We were like velcro.

My parents had this story about when they were dating in Chicago; their friends called them Vinny and Vicky Velcro because they were so attached. Was this… that? I was finally feeling something akin to the you’ll know when you know and the right person will come when you least expect it and all the other cliches I’d never experienced. Maybe this was it. Maybe it was finally my turn to be loved. Henry was the first boy who seemed to match my wit, my ambition, my emotional intelligence.

Despite the flirting, nothing would actually happen. Although we kept orbiting each other, there was one problem: there was another girl set as his phone background, his girlfriend back home. I asked about her immediately when I noticed her on his phone screen. He told me she was a year older than us; she’d just graduated high school and was now college-bound. Their relationship was rocky, he said, but she was still his phone background, which genuinely means something in teenage relationships and even some adult ones. He justified his behavior with me by insinuating that their relationship was ending since she was going to be leaving. For some reason, I bought it. Life so far had been kind to me; I genuinely couldn’t conceptualize that there’d be any point in lying to some girl at a random conference that he’d likely never see again. Still, he was taken, and he wasn’t quite acting like it.

Even my seventeen-year-old brain could sense the red flag, but I glossed over it because the conference, like summer camp, felt like a liminal space where rules could be slippery. We weren’t doing anything. We were total strangers. Somehow, it felt harmless. I certainly didn’t mind the attention, and she didn’t necessarily seem real; just a pair of eyes watching us from the lock screen of his phone. We weren’t holding hands or anything.

Of course, she was and is real. Of course I still had a scarcity mindset around good men and a competitive mindset toward other women. Of course I wanted to act like she didn’t exist so I could wake up to Henry’s text messages, so I could look for him in the crowd at each event, only to find his eyes clearly looking for me.

The night of the dance—the very last night of the conference—Henry sent me a picture of himself in the suit he was going to wear, a white button up with a black tie and a tan jacket, sticking his tongue out and winking into the phone. I practically bounced in my dorm room twin bed, blinking in disbelief as I secretly showed the picture to the other girls, squealing and trembling. I could not believe a man this cute was sending me selfies like that.

I wondered, electricity going through my heart for a brief moment, if he’d also sent that picture to his hometown girl.

Henry and I never did anything more than flirt, only a little PG dancing the last night to “I love it” by Icona Pop, and when the week was up, I hugged him goodbye and waved from the school bus that would take me to the airport and figured I’d never see him again. The end. It was the inevitable final scene to what had surprisingly been a pretty fun week. Oh well, I thought. It was fun while it lasted. Like my parade of summer camp crushes, I thought Henry was someone I’d quickly forget as I reintegrated into my real life in Chandler, Arizona.

I texted him from the bus, holding back tears; all of our phones were blowing up as we exchanged pictures, heartfelt goodbyes, and each other’s contact information. Henry, however, was somber as we texted back and forth. He confided in me that he was feeling low, not particularly excited to get back to his hometown; he especially wasn’t excited to be in the car with his parents. They sounded cruel from his stories, so I texted him back comforting platitudes, keeping him virtual company on the drive to his house.

I boarded my flight, and put my phone on airplane mode, thinking that was the finale.

But when I got home to Arizona, I was surprised to find that the texting continued. And continued. And continued.

We texted straight through that summer. I had never texted so much in my life. Good morning texts. Jokes. Serious texts. Long-form, essay-like discussions about the way we viewed the world. Religion. Math. Spanish… He was clever, quick, funny, and interesting. I felt like he got me, like he was listening. And it felt like I could understand him, too. He even said so himself.

Although he was allegedly taken that summer, things weren’t progressing well in their apparently doomed relationship, and it appeared they were really going to break up. One week they were together, the next, not so much. I didn’t really know what was going on. At the time, I considered us to be good friends and flirts. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong by texting him back. Our texts were sweet, but not peppered with anything scandalous or overtly romantic.

About two months after we met, I built up the nerve to tell him how I felt. Perhaps this was a breakage of the Girl Code. To rationalize my decision, I thought: if it was ‘True Love,’ I had to fight for it, didn’t I? True Love justified the means. True Love obligated me to take a deep breath in my bedroom one night, laying on my leopard print pillow and say, “I like you as more than a friend. And I need you to know this, even if nothing can happen between us.” It felt dumb and romantic and pitiful and movie-like. It was dramatic in a I-just-have-to-get-this-off-my-chest kind of way. It was just a text message, but it felt like I’d run after him and tapped on his shoulder before his flight took off. My heart raced as I waited for those three little dots to appear on my phone, indicating he was texting back.

I wasn’t thinking of his girlfriend; I was thinking of myself. Still, I didn’t ask him to be my boyfriend. What would be the point of dating, I thought, if he was in Wisconsin and I was in Arizona? Especially as high schoolers with little agency and less money. We were busy—with academic activities, with sports, with school, with applying to colleges. He was still busy with his girlfriend. But I told him how I felt anyway, because I was a seventeen-year-old girl in love and this was the kind of twenty seconds of courage that Tumblr had sold me. I just wanted him to know. My heart couldn’t contain it any longer.

Much to my delight, he felt the same way (as I knew he would), and regular Skype sessions and a few mailed mixed CDs went back and forth. It was over-the-top, with his songs each correlating to a particular memory (even though most of our memories were really just text-conversations) and then I’d send back a CD with my own choice of song correlating to all the moments he’d identified. Senior year started early for me, and we texted throughout my school day while he was still home on summer break. He sent selfies, handsome pictures of himself, sometimes including a bit of skin, his abs, creeping downward. He replied extremely quickly to my messages, showing interest. If his responsiveness was any indication, he was very into me. He and I had jokes about how I rolled my eyes at him so much that they rolled out of my head and down the street and he had to go streaking off after them. The eyeball emoji then took on new meaning, emojis piling up with secret meanings. We made wishes at 10:22, because in military time, that was 22:22, which had twice the power of 11:11. He would send videos of his piano playing, surprisingly gentle. Soon, we had a song that was our song. I hadn’t touched the piano much since I quit lessons, but I re-taught myself “Clair de Lune” and sent him videos back.

It seemed too good to be true. It was cloud nine-and-three-quarters.

Somewhere in there, Henry and his girlfriend broke up. He seemed so interested in me that I had to believe he’d been slowly retreating from their relationship, but I actually have no idea. I made so many assumptions. Maybe he was showing up on her doorstep with flowers, his phone vibrating with my laughter in his back pocket, for all I knew. I imagined that it was college, not me, that came to be the wedge between them. Did they fight about me? Did she even know about me? Either way, they were broken up, and Henry was single going into his senior year of high school.

Finally, in September, there was just no point resisting him; in my head, we were practically boyfriend and girlfriend. I was single only on a technicality; I wasn’t going to do anything with anyone while he had my whole heart in the palm of his hand. I didn’t even think about finding a Homecoming date, I was so smitten. On September 7th, I texted him that I’d like to be his girlfriend. He responded jovially, making some joke, and suddenly nervous and feeling risk-averse, I started to back up, saying that I was only kidding, that maybe we shouldn’t date, it didn’t make sense for us so far apart. It was just wishful thinking. This backing up upset him. He didn’t talk to me the rest of the night, which was so unlike us. I remember getting burritos with my friend at the local joint that evening, nervously checking my phone and telling her what had happened. “I think I scared him off,” I worried, biting my lip. It made me feel lousy, like I had messed something up. My stomach sank. She told me to just go for it.

The next day, he told me that I had hurt his feelings like I’d suspected, and I apologized—the first of hundreds I would utter in the coming years. So instead, we started dating long distance, officially, on September 8, 2013.

I shook off the little miscommunication; September 8th was just as good as September 7th. It was senior year, I was poised to attend a great college, I was taking classes with all my best friends, varsity tennis tryouts were around the corner, and most importantly, I had my first real boyfriend. My toes curled at the thought.

We’re the same age, sure. We have a few common interests. We both took piano lessons. But we grew up on completely opposite sides of the country—attended different high schools and colleges, competed in different sports, and lived in practically opposing climates over a thousand miles apart. She was donning winter coats to high school in subzero Wisconsin winters while I played tennis in short-shorts on baking Arizona courts.

But unbeknownst to us, we fell in love with the same boy. We wouldn’t be writing to you now if he hadn’t irrevocably changed our stories.

What at the time felt so personal to us turned out to be a pattern. Some of it seems so textbook in hindsight that I want to pull my hair out. I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know it could happen to me, that I could disappear like that. When I’m at my angriest, my most frustrated, my most how-did-we-let-this-happen?!, I turn to my elders—parents, aunts, neighbors, teachers—and I want to scream: why didn’t you teach me sooner?!

We are writing to you now in an effort to teach someone sooner.

Some of our role models probably didn’t know how to teach us, and the rest hadn’t been taught themselves. After all, the gender landscape has changed rapidly in the U.S. in just my thirty years on Earth. My mom was born when schools in the south were still formally segregated; she was 15 when women were allowed their own credit cards. Many of us may be the most liberated women in our entire lineage. Thus, we are living the research in real time, building the boat in the water. We’re navigating gender as technology constantly changes, as work moves from the office to remote and back to the office, as climate change alters the surface of our planet and war rages. Still, we must try to be lighthouses for each other; we must light up the night, light up the dark places, talk about what we have learned even as we imperfectly march forward ourselves. We must continue the discourse about equality and respect and abuse even as we ourselves experience little relief from the challenges, both big and small, of not being cis-men in a world built for them. We must even do it for the very elders who couldn’t always do it for us.

Being a millennial woman in 21st-century America means living in a paradox where gender equality is often hailed as a battle already won, yet we navigate a reality where our rights, safety, and autonomy are both quietly and openly contested. C’mon, women can vote, right? Women are elected officials, right? Women are outnumbering men on college campuses, so we must not have anything to complain about, right?

Smack in the middle of the cacophony, during our high school years from 2010-2014, Shannon and I were just girls. Girls trying to get into college, have fun, make friends, listen to music, play outside, and find, well, true love (it might’ve been the Disney princesses we watched on VHS that made us prioritize that last one).

As girls in the nineties, Shannon and I were told we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up, but the posters of past U.S. presidents hanging in our classrooms were (and as of this writing, still are) all men. Nearly all white men. We learned about our periods from American Girl’s The Care and Keeping of YOU self-help book, then were made fun of at school if a tampon fell out of our backpacks. We were laughing along to Drake and Josh and iCarly only to find out later that our child stars were being abused.

We were having sex at fifteen but didn’t learn about consent until we went to college three years later, shining a haunting blacklight on the four years we just served in American high schools. We were taught to avoid getting raped but also to drink jungle juice out of Gatorade coolers in our friends’ basements; we studied Roe v. Wade in our women’s studies classes and then had to Google things like can I still buy Plan B in my state? after it was reversed. We were raised on diet culture and then told to be body positive and then, oh wait, the new thing is to be body neutral. I hope you’re keeping up! You wouldn’t want anyone to know that you might still harbor internalized and outdated perspectives on womanhood during hot girl summer, after all.

Oh, and ‘girl’ was out (it’s infantilizing!) but now it’s in (we’re reclaiming it!).

Right, girls?!

Anyone tired yet?

After the Me Too movement, started by Tarana Burke, gained traction, there was perhaps a premature sigh of relief. At least from me. Third Wave Feminism was going to fix the last dregs of inequality. Third and final wave, I thought naively. Big-time athletes and Hollywood stars were being held accountable. Surely the moral arc of the universe was bending toward justice, as it always does at the end of an American film. Women (me) carried around Chanel Miller’s Know My Name in their handbags! Universities were forced to take stronger stances on sexual assault! Social media exploded with qualified professionals (and random lay people) posting infographics about love-bombing, emotional abuse, narcissism, and the rest! Documentaries exposed some of the darkest patriarchal threats to women! The Bechdel Test became a thing people name-dropped in conversation! Hooray!

As a woman who simultaneously felt like it could never happen to me, but also, experienced it personally and at length, this was a momentous moment. It was going to get better for the girlies.

The American landscape has changed in some substantial ways. Marriage statistics changed. Women’s standards (somewhat) changed. In the last few years, I saw a Tweet that read simply:

They Tweeted this like it was obvious! A given! In lowercase, no less! Like we collectively were not tolerating dudes making us cry! Anymore, at least.

Spoiler alert: I did in fact think the dude making me cry every day was my soulmate.

So women are learning, and tolerating less mistreatment, and the landscape is changing, and also, no men have been held accountable for the Epstein files. I used to think that feminism had a linear trajectory: women’s rights would keep shattering the glass ceiling shard by shard, and the patriarchy would get a little more dismantled for each up and coming generation. I thought that my girlhood experiences and abuses would read like foreign territory to girls born in the 2010s, the 2020s. The older I get, the more I see how entrenched the patriarchy is, how often we have to fight the same battles our foremothers fought, how change isn’t linear but rather a spiral, how liberation is not something earned once but something continuously stewarded, protected, and maintained lest we let our guards down.

What I’m saying is, I thought our story would mostly resonate with Millennials, girls who’d been girls when I was a girl. Now, more than ever, I think it’s for everybody.

Here’s to more people seeing what I simply couldn’t see for so long.

One of the hardest parts of unpacking sexual assault and emotional abuse is that at some point you think by now you’ve heard it all. After Weinstein and Nassar and Epstein, you think you know how big the quilt of abuse is. You think you can look at it all at once, armed with definitions and vocabulary: this is what happened to me. Deep breath. You can almost, almost compartmentalize it and move on with your life. But as I write, I keep finding patterns and fabrics in my quilt that I’d forgotten. On a phone call, my aunt reminds me of things about my abuser that I’d repressed. Another patch sewn. I find suicidal poetry in my old diary that I forgot I’d written. Stitch, stitch. I have a nightmare about my abuser a decade after he exited my life (this was like four nights ago, upon resurrecting this experience for Substack). I unfold square after square of my own story, remembering. It’s sad, revisiting these hollow places. The more people Shannon and I tell about this project, the more stories and patches get added to the quilt. You tell someone that you are writing about your abuse, and they will tell you theirs. The transgressions we have all endured are tingling on our skin, exploding, fizzing, asking to be let out.

I say, “I was in love with and controlled by a serial-cheating rapist.” I think this is the last word. It should be bad enough to fill the air. And yet someone will always pipe up, “You did!? Me, too.” Of course, that’s how the Me Too movement was born, and I am not here to reinvent the wheel. But it’s one thing when it’s Twitter blowing up and women from all over the world are contributing to an online march of black and white letters. It is another thing to have it spill down your coffee cups, run down your legs, dribble into ordinary conversations amongst ordinary people. To have it happen to your summer intern and to your best friend and even to your mom and probably to your grandmothers, who you didn’t get the chance to ask. The quilt is huge. Some days, it seems insurmountable—large enough to block out the sun. A dear friend once looked at me deadpan and casually said, as if it were old news, “I’m not sure every woman gets raped. But certainly every woman finds herself in bed having sex with someone and wishing she wasn’t.” Even the big statistics—like one in five college women have been raped—cannot cover the reality. There is more and more and more. It is less like a quilt and more like a clown pulling never-ending fabric out of his sleeve.

Does any woman get through this life unscathed?

Seeing the quilt in its entirety, I zoom out, examining my life as the details swing into place like pearls on a necklace. Like when I was in 6th grade and an old man visiting my elementary school told me that boys would soon be ‘all over me.’ Or the time I had to literally run out of a bar and hide to escape my old high school buddy who had made me his mission that night. The times I’ve been cat-called; the times my butt has been grabbed; the times I got angry and men told me to relax, it’s just a joke. The time, the time, the time. A lifetime of micro- and macro-aggressions, even in this so-called feminist era, for a relatively lucky woman, no less. Sure, #notallmen, but all women are dragging this heavy ass quilt behind us. It is full of sticks and mud and hair and blood, and for years of my life, it was smothering.

I just want to tuck you all under the quilt, on this side of it, where it’s safe and warm and okay. I just want you to know I am rubbing circles into your back; I am listening; I believe you. I don’t care if what happened is ‘technically’ against the law, or is ‘technically’ abuse, or is ‘technically’ assault. I care about the hollow feeling in your stomach that says that was wrong. I care about the nightmares and self-doubt planted. Men, afraid of losing their power to touch and grope in the name of ‘just messing around,’ will doubt your sense of wrongness, will ask for your blood-alcohol levels and how many community service hours you’ve been doing and what you were wearing. Some women, who gain power by being close to these men, or who fear validating your abuse will make them realize that they, too, are victims, may also doubt you. They will say prove that he didn’t have the right to touch you.

Despite all these purported feminist gains, people up to their ears in podcasts about healthy relationships are still not being treated well. People who would also be surprised to learn that it’s not normal to have their partner make them cry every day. I’ve seen colleagues become a puddle of tears from a two-word text message from their boyfriend. I’ve seen a woman post in detail to her Instagram stories about her escape from her abuser, only to update her stories a month later about them getting back together. There are still warehouses full of untested rape kits. Despite all this education and democratic knowledge-sharing and reimagining of norms, femininity, gender, and more, so many of us are still settling for less than we deserve. And we are still hurting.

But my handhold on this particular quilt of heartache started to loosen when I connected with Shannon. The sad patches we had embroidered alone in our respective self-loathing quiets ended up being puzzle pieces; our stories fit together. The boy who hurt her in Wisconsin was the boy who hurt me all the way in Arizona. I mean that literally; Shannon and I were abused by the same man, at basically the same time, two thousand miles apart, in our formative high school and early college years.

It was so easy to doubt our own stories. Maybe we were overthinking it. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. He was just having a hard time with his mental health. He was just struggling with his parents. He was a good guy. He wouldn’t do this. But Shannon and I got to be mirrors for each other, and what we saw in the reflection solidified what our guts had known all along.

Although he was the bridge that connected us, Shannon and I have now navigated so much more womanhood together than just excavating our wounds.

As we swapped stories, unveiling more and more disturbing details, putting the pieces together, Shannon never came to me and said, “Let’s write this down and DESTROY HIM.” She said, “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” This writing isn’t meant to be a bloodbath. It is only one of a thousand attempts at healing.

We have altered our perpetrator’s name, not because he is innocent, or because we are scared of him, or because we do not wish to ruin his life. Let me be perfectly clear: there is a vengeful part of me that would quite like to ruin his life, actually. There is a part of me that thinks it’s rather unfair that his LinkedIn is going to say “Ph.D.” instead of “rapist.”

He may be etched into our past, but he is not invited into our still-promising futures, and to name him would also be to carry him forward, when he is better left behind. Finally, after years of giving a shit, I don’t care what he does next.

This is memoir. It’s not a legal case against him. No one can object. I don’t want my truth on trial. No one can strike any detail, no matter how small, from the record. Shannon’s and my stories corroborate each other’s.

Henry, which is the name we’ll be using, stole chapters of our lives that were supposed to be some of the happiest and most care-free. He walked away with our innocence. At times, Shannon and I both considered dangerous coping mechanisms that threatened our futures. I thought I would never find love again. Nearly a decade after his intrusion into our lives, we have finally been able to sit at the computer and breathe forward what happened to us. This isn’t a witch hunt. It’s a warning.

This is for every teenage girl who is taught that jealousy is cute. This is for women who think it’s normal that their boyfriends tell them how to dress. This is for girls who cry every night even though there was no physical violence. This is for the girls who made themselves small and erased themselves for men who tactically taught them that they weren’t good enough. And it’s for the women who, now gaining the language to describe what happened to them, are horrified, and just want to squeeze their inner children for all that they couldn’t protect themselves from.

Y’all are magic.

We arrived to this point like many other sane women who were put, so lovingly, into the crazy ex-girlfriend bin. Except we aren’t crazy. Meeting each other, years after one man wore us each down until we were raw and bleeding, opened a pathway to healing and finally, validation that we were never crazy at all. Almost a decade after the worst of it, we’re ready to share that journey with the world.

Whether you were also tossed into the “crazy” bin, have dated literally at all in the 21st century, or are simply intrigued by our story, we’re glad you found us. Please, stay awhile. Have a look around.

The logistics

We will publish our joint memoir in alternating chapters once per week. The manuscript is complete, but releasing on schedule gives each piece its time and moment to breathe. Many rabbit holes, side quests, and other essays were cut from the manuscript and may end up being published in addition to the regular Chapters as Interludes.

This is a free publication, but your support goes a long way in helping us keep this blog running, and will free us to create more interesting and nuanced content. As time goes on, we may add little ~treats~ behind a paywall, like audio recordings, live videos, essays, etc. We are open to this journey unwinding in her own way, and we feel excited by not knowing quite where it will take us yet.

The true events in these essays are all told to the best of our human ability and memory. Some names and details may have been changed.

So we’re clear:

These events took place on stolen land, and while we believe that universal themes may arise from our experiences, we know that women, femmes, and genderqueer folks, and even men of different backgrounds, races, families, ethnicities, religions, class and more experience patriarchy and obstacles in a myriad of layered ways both known and foreign to us. Our story and those similar are just one slice of the pie chart of oppression that we will continue dismantling, one big fat bite at a time. An intersectional, decolonized, restorative future is the one we are trying to build for the next generation through this writing.

Content warnings will accompany particularly challenging chapters, but sexual and emotional abuse will be themes throughout. Sorry. We wouldn’t have chosen it either :-)

Alright, y’all.

Welcome to The Club.

Love,

Rach & Shan xx