Chapter Three
I decided to become a lawyer when I was in fourth grade. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and felt a kinship with Scout and a deep admiration for Atticus Finch. I was a pleaser, and it seemed like being a lawyer meant always doing the right thing.
That same year, I was cast as Orphan Annie in a school production.
The experience was like a drug. I started auditioning for anything I could.
My entire identity became entangled in fictional characters from plays and musicals.
When I was ten, I went all out for the role of Maria in the town production of West Side Story.
I wanted it so badly that I believed my love for the role transcended age (the casting director disagreed).
Performing made me feel closer to the world I wanted to be part of, far from a small town and an unhappy homelife.
My parents separated for the first time when I was thirteen, then flip-flopped for the next five years, meaning my brother Artie and I spent middle and high school bouncing between them.
The instability at home drove me deeper into theater.
I was devastated when my parents only let me apply to state schools.
I ended up at the University of Virginia with a plan: If I could hack college theater, I would secretly apply for drama scholarships in New York.
I was one of two freshmen cast as nonspeaking fairies in the campus production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
My dorm was covered in application materials for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
My essays were spell-checked, reference letters were written, scholarship applications were done.
At the end of spring semester, my parents’ marathon divorce finally came to a head, and life changed dramatically.
Litigating a divorce for half a decade had drained their financial resources.
Neither one was happy with the outcome. It was the end of “supported” life as I knew it.
I’d taken on moderate student loans my freshman year, but my living expenses and a large part of my in-state tuition had been covered.
I needed a job to support myself if I wanted to stay in school.
I went from wide-eyed college student to pragmatic survivalist. I withdrew my drama school application and switched my major to political science.
I found a full-time summer job as a nanny, and when the fall semester started, I condensed my course schedule to two days a week so I could nanny the other three. I waitressed in between.
The toxicity from my parents’ divorce felt boundless. Everything had become muted. Colors. Emotions. Motivation. Even my ambition.
Then, I met Ben.
Ben was friends with my freshman roommate’s older brother, who had just graduated from MIT and moved back to DC.
We met when I tagged along to her family’s house over fall break.
He got my number, and before long, we were talking on the phone a few nights a week.
I was nineteen, and he was twenty-four. I wasn’t very worldly, and he felt decades older.
I quickly grew attached to our conversations.
He was working as a data analyst for the International Monetary Fund, which made him a big fish compared to the microscopic world I came from.
He read David Foster Wallace and knew everything about history and politics.
He’d traveled to Egypt and Iceland and New Zealand. I’d barely been outside of Virginia.
Our first date was at an Ethiopian restaurant close to campus. It felt very culturally sophisticated. And after all the time spent on the phone, the conversation seemed effortless.
“You’ve never even been on a small plane? Not even one of those regional ones that flies out of airports with one landing strip?”
I shook my head. “And now the thought of flying terrifies me,” I said, eyeing the platter of fermented flatbread.
“Do you have a passport?”
“Not yet,” I said, my nose tingling from the unexpected taste of vinegar. “But I’d like to get one,” I added quickly.
He leaned back and took me in, like I was a tabula rasa in the form of a girl who needed someone to make her world bigger.
“Well then, let’s book your first flight.”
There was a kindness—and a calmness—to Ben that I responded to.
Despite our different upbringings, he seemed to get me.
His intellectual curiosity notwithstanding, he had a profound appreciation for the simple things.
He came from a tight-knit family. I had grown up with a dysfunction that made a happy family life feel just out of reach.
Ben gave me the chance to build a life with someone who would quickly become the antidote to the instability I’d grown up with.
By the end of that semester, even though we were separated by distance, Ben and I were seeing each other seriously.
He would drive the two hours down to UVA, and we’d spend our weekends visiting nearby wineries or camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I took a full course load during the summers so I could graduate a semester early, even though Ben wanted me to take an internship in DC to be closer to him.
I was focused on the long game, still driven by the urgency that I’d felt since childhood to make something of my life.
I finished my last exam on a Friday and started a job the following Monday at a nondescript marketing agency in Arlington. We moved in together, and our lives fell into a comfortable routine. I’d found a partner.
Being with Ben grounded me in a way I’d never felt before. A year later, I told him I wanted to get married. I was so resolute, no one second-guessed me.