SHIT, AUSTIN. SINCE WHEN DID you think of me as always pissed? Worrying about you wasn’t being pissed. Someone had to do it and obviously, you weren’t too concerned with your future since you just got out of jail and the first thing you did was throw a party with plenty of booze and underage drinkers. On post. At Dad’s house.

Those were the thoughts swirling around in my head as I walked up the stairs to my old room. The air inside the house was thick and getting thicker. I had to get away. I needed a break from Austin. From the vodka. From the party. I wasn’t sure if I needed a break from Kael and for a moment, I almost forgot he was even there.

For a moment.

Almost.

There was no way he missed the exchange. He probably thought I was being catty, that I was a bitch. It wasn’t true. It really wasn’t. I tried not to give other girls a hard time. We had it tough enough. Hormones. Periods. Underwire bras. Double standards. Douchey guys. We needed to stick together, not stick it to each other. I really believed that. But … there was always a but, wasn’t there? I just couldn’t help that immediate assessment I did of other females. Giving them the once-over, trying to determine who they were, where they figured in our invisible hierarchy. It seemed so mean to put it like that, but it wasn’t that I was comparing them to me—more like I was comparing myself to them.

Ruffly shirt girl was prettier than me. She had beautiful clear skin, slender hips, and long legs. Her hair was amazing. She dressed to flatter herself, to bring out her best features. I dressed in what was clean(ish) or what was on sale. I wasn’t competing with Katie, Barbie, or whatever her name was. (Okay, that was bitchy.) I really wasn’t. First of all, she was in a totally different league than I was, and second, her target was my brother. That was clear from the get-go. So this comparison thing, this competition … it wasn’t about guys.

If it was, why would I compare myself to the girls on IG or on TV, like I did when Madelaine Petsch looked out at me from the screen? She was flawless. Even with my ultra-high-def TV, she had the smooth skin of a porcelain doll. Not a blemish, not a spot or bump. It almost made me want to go vegan, if that’s what it did for you.

I thought about this sort of thing a lot. I tried to figure out where it came from. Where all my insecurities came from. I really didn’t care that boys looked at other girls more than they looked at me. It was just that some girls made me feel less than. I couldn’t explain it, not really, but it was hard to get out of my head. And the thing was, I knew it wasn’t just me. I thought about Elodie, beautiful blonde Parisian Elodie with her pretty cheeks and doe eyes. She’d sit with a mirror in her lap, picking at her face, saying how horrible her skin was, that her eyes were uneven and her nose was off-center. Did all women do that?

This was when I missed my mom the most. It would have been nice to be able to talk to her about this sort of thing, to have someone to confide in, to have her listen without judgment. Has it always been like this, I’d ask her? And she’d tell me, No, it was never this bad, social media and selfies and the Kardashians have made everything so much worse. Or she’d say, Yes, it really has always been like this. I used to compare myself to Charlie’s Angels back in the day. Then she’d get out her old photo album and we’d laugh at her eighties hair.

Who was I kidding?

That would never have happened.