Authors: Francine Pascal

Gone (26 page)

But the dreams did stop, and time kept on passing. And now that I finally have some real distance from it all, I can allow myself an occasional reflective moment like this one, and I can make at least one conclusion with absolute assurance: When it comes to my teenage years â¦ I had absolutely no clue.

Some of this madness I can attribute to hormones. Some of it I can attribute to the fact that
my teenage years did in fact suck. I lost a lot of people I loved. I sustained an infinite number of cuts and bruises. I saw way too much blood, and I stood at death's door way too many times. But in truth, I think the real culprit here is a demon more powerful than hormones, more powerful than an empirically crappy life, more powerful than death evenâstronger than any evil mastermind or weapon of mass destruction. It is a merciless disease that can send any teenage girl into a massive unrecoverable tailspin. And I was no exceptionâ¦

Low self-esteem.
That is the insidious disease. It makes skinny girls starve themselves and pretty girls chop up their faces. It makes us forget who we are, and it makes us want to be something else. Anything else, really. Anything with an
“er”
attached to the end: Pretti
er,
smart
er,
rich
er,
or in my case normal
er.
Okay, there's no such word, but don't let that cloud
my point. My point is this: In my personal opinion, low self-esteem is the most rampantly uncharted cause of death in the world. It turns short unattractive men into tyrannical murderous dictators. It's the primary reason people get drunk off their asses and drive too fast in their cars. It makes lonely alienated kids kill themselves or go on mass murdering sprees. It made a gifted, reasonably attractive girl like me hate myself with a deep passion, and pretty much everyone else, too. To put it quite simply, it made my teenage life a rather dismal experience and I doubt I'm alone on that one. And I've been suffering from the disease since the age of twelve, and only now, almost ten years later, am I beginning to go into remission.

Why am I finally recovering at the ripe old age of 20? Because I met someone. And I
don't
mean a boy. That is the biggest myth of them all; that a boyfriend can
cancel out years of low self-esteem with a gorgeous smile and professions of love. That is a big fat ugly illusion, and the sooner my gender figures that one out, the sooner we'll all be on the road to recovery. No, I didn't meet a boy, I met a woman named Jennifer Bishop. Special Agent Jennifer Bishop.

She walked into the Stanford University gym while I was pummeling a punching bag with roundhouse kicks, and she asked me point blank if I'd ever considered a life in law enforcement. I, of course, told her no. Why would I possibly want a life in law-enforcement after everything I'd been throughâafter everything my father had been through? This was at the end of my two year stint at Stanford. This was three months ago, before the summer, when I still wasn't sure I wanted a life in anything.

But Agent Bishop was almost as stubborn as I am. And just as blunt, too. She said some things
to me that no one has ever said, or at least, she put them in a way that no one has ever put them. And for at least one moment in that conversation, I admit that I could actually see it. I could see the pall of self-pitying narcissism lift from my life for a split-second. I could see how much time I'd pissed away on self-imposed alienation. And I could see these four words that suddenly made an enormous amount of sense. Four words that felt like they could actually be a glimpse of my future:

Special Agent Gaia Moore.

It happened fast. Just a moment earlier, Chloe had been sitting with Amy and Paul on the observation deck atop Coit Tower in San Francisco.
What would happen if I dropped a penny from up here?
she wondered. She climbed up on the railing and dug into her jeans pocket, hunting for spare change.

That was when she fell.

As Chloe tumbled through the fog, all she could think was,
My mother will be so upset when she finds out I skipped schoolâ¦. Maybe all that stuff about your life flashing before your eyes is just bull.

Or maybe Chloe already knew, down in the unconscious depths of her mind, that she still had eight lives to go.

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