Her English teacher at the time had the students spend five minutes every day on an exercise called Vomit, in which they wrote down every phrase that occurred to them. Then, at fifteen, she watched “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and was uncomfortably captivated by Angelina Jolie. She found it trivial and unbecoming when girls at school pined over their crushes. Samantha enjoyed reading about botany and had long assumed that, like some plants, she was asexual, a self-sustaining organism. She wanted to go to Manhattan, which she’d never visited, because it seemed like a good place to meet other lesbians. The only other option, she decided, was to flee. Samantha had got A’s in high school and had planned to escape to college, until she realized she couldn’t afford it. Reclining in her chair in the brightly lit garage, she closed her eyes and thought, Is this going to be my life? She went to class stoned and wrote suicidal poems about the shame of being molested by a family friend: “why try when there is no hope / for my dirty soul there is no soap.” The thought of remaining in her home town, in central Florida, made her feel ill. She had just graduated from high school, where she had few friends, and felt invisible. Samantha was sitting on a lawn chair in her parents’ garage, smoking a joint, when she decided to run away.
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