[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ]	I remember laughing a lot, but not much else, about those years. That chunk of my life is like a Monet, pretty from a distance but one big mess when looked at up close. We would do fun things like go to the beach and the skate parks and hang out at each other’s houses. And Mary Jane was by my side, every step of the way. I remember some faces and some names and some places, but not much else. Weed affects your memory and when you’re high non-stop for years at a time, you basically have amnesia. I remember having fun, or at least I thought I was having fun at the time. I remember having lots of friends, or people who I thought were my friends. I remember being happy, or at least what I thought was happiness. About six months later, I got home to find a paper with the signs of clinical depression on my bed. My mother, the therapist, was big on passive aggressive confrontation. But according to her, I was never home, and when I was, I never listened to her, so it was the only way to get through to me. I began going down the checklist. Yes, I was irritable. Yes, I had difficulty concentrating and making decisions. Yes, I had insomnia. Yes, I lost pleasure in activities I once enjoyed. I crumpled the paper up and pitched it into the trash. I wasn’t depressed. I was thirteen. I was normal. Everything was fine. And even if I was depressed, it would be because of them; my dysfunctional family that made me want to rip my hair out and spin my head around. At that point my mother had left my father for another woman, my father re-married a bitch that is the exact parallel of Annette Benning’s character in American Beauty, he expressed himself through belts and fists rather than words, and my divorced parents lived on the same block. My uncle had just died of AIDS, although my dad’s family told everyone that it was cancer, my grandparents and aunt on my mother’s side were all alcoholics. And my family on my father’s side were all orthodox Jews that declared my mother a chiksa and that she was going to hell. My mother was the therapist who wanted to talk everything out and my Dad was the Jewish father who wanted to talk about absolutely nothing. And we all had problems. But what family doesn’t? At any rate, I wasn’t depressed. I just wanted to be left alone. I just didn’t want to deal with all of it. I just wanted to be a teenager and do my own thing. The questions came later. Why did I have Visine in my room? Where was I going when I left the house? Why did I eat a whole box of cookies? Why was I always chewing gum? Why wasn’t I sleeping? Why did the school call and say that I wasn’t there?