Excerpt from Rent Girl.

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Author: Tea, MichelleMcCubbin, Laurenn

I was twenty-one years old but inside I felt thirty, thirty-one. I hated revealing my age to anyone because it gave them the wrong idea about me. It gave them the idea that I was young when inside I felt ageless, that I didn't know much when really I knew more than they did. I thought that I felt thirty-one, thirty-two years old, but I was wrong. Now that I am thirty-two I can feel how it feels, and it does not feel twenty-one. So I was the sort of twenty-one-year-old who believes that deep in their soul they are thirty, thirty-five, which really is such a twenty-one-year-old way to think. And here is my lesbian prostitute girlfriend. She has a real female body, womanly because she's twenty-seven already, and I have a child's body, straight flat all the way down with a couple of puckers for tits, like someone meanly pinched the skin there, gave it a yank and it stayed that way.

When Steph confessed she thought she was copping to being only one thing, an escort, but she was of course also revealing herself to be a liar, something neither of us understood at the time. I understood that this world is a weasly world, it was cruel and forced compromise on everyone, and often the first thing to go was the truth. Like, you'd like to be free and open with the facts but you simply can't, because you'll get grounded or fired, or your kids will be taken away or your girlfriend will break up with you.

I understood lying to be a survival skill, but after listening to Steph tell the woman that she did occasionally nanny for that she couldn't come in because her brother had been struck by a car and killed -- it lodged a suspicion, a bit of doom, in my heart. A magnetized sliver of grimness that drew to it every lie Steph would tell, getting chunkier and heavier as time went on. My mouth hung open as Steph spoke into the telephone receiver, details about blood and bone, and her voice was numb with trauma. A little catch of dryness at the back of her throat, like the muscle that was holding back the torrent was spasming, weakening and the woman had better let her off the phone fast, which she did.

What do you say when your nanny calls in sick with a car crash death? You say oh my god and oh no and you say okay. Steph hung up the phone and smiled triumphant and laughed and said, Was that terrible? and I didn't know whether she meant what she had done or her delivery, her acting ability. Was that terrible? It was convincing, Steph really did have a brother and personally I was too superstitious to tell such a lie, a death-lie about a living, breathing relative you love, but I was twenty-one and I admired Steph for doing it, for tempting fate, the universe, a punishing god -- was there no one she would not fuck with? No, there was no one whom Steph would not fuck with, and I thought that perhaps with such a person beside me I could be safe inside this weasly world of cruelty and compromise.

Excerpted from Rent Girl, by Michel/e Tea; illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin. Copyright © 2004 by Michelle Tea. Used with permission of Last Gasp.

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By Michelle Tea

Illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin