Don't Know What You Got...

(Kayla, 1983)

Cheyenne and I settled in pretty quickly. Which got me thinking about life in general. You sleep, eat, work, hang out, watch TV, go to bed. The details are the only difference. Which, of course, make all the difference in the world.

That night, I slipped into feeling sorry for myself again. I missed my friends back in New York; Star, Jeanette, even our suicidal neighbor. Robin made me laugh, but she wasn't my best friend. Best friends know all your secrets and love you anyway. I still felt too embarrassed to even talk to Robin. I still had tons of secrets to keep.

That night, i lay flat on my bed, facedown.

The week after i met Tom, i spent part of my pay check at Aqui. Unbelievably, i didn't get fat. The explosion of blubber i feared, once i let myself drop Cheyenne's diet plan, never materialized. My stomach stopped growling--that was the biggest change in my body.

Getting to know Tom felt good, too.

Tom didn't care what anyone thought of him. He told me, "It's a choice you have to make. Are you going to give some dumb jerk power over you? Or are you going to empower yourself and become whomever you want to become?"

When he wasn't cracking me up, he was saying deep stuff like that. And using cool words like "empower" and "whomever."

Incredibly, life's master plan was flowing me into a less stressed-out space. Though Star was a hundred and forty miles away, my serious kiss was light-years away, and my former self was a quickly fading memory, i had Tom and burritos and air-conditioning and Cheyenne's cooking and Puck's huge, fuzzy ears.