Until I lost them in Gulf Shores, Alabama, on a trip with my 64-year-old roommate, I kept my retainers in a limited edition Valentine’s Day sweet-tarts tin, a gift from my mother. On the outside, a heavily made up Robert Pattinson. Underneath his face, in cursive, emblazoned: Team Edward.

***In seventh grade, I didn’t sleep. This was, I thought, another kind of punishment from God — though to be fair, I had already been punished plenty. I was fat, ugly, hairy. I was poor and strange. I thought of myself as a scholar in a town of hillbillies. My brief excursions into masturbation left me feeling panicky instead of blissful. My endless nights, biblical, were simply confirmation of everything I already knew about myself, and yet I loved my suffering. Were she a woman, I would have made myself sick from wanting her. Though I could not call it want, not yet.

***Someone famous friends me on Facebook. He says he is Taylor Lautner, though in this case, his last name is spelled as “Lautnerr.” This, he tells me, is to keep those he does not consider friends from adding him and causing a scene. Of course, of course. Celebrity is something I can only delusionally aspire to, and so I feel chosen and a little special that among the legion, I have been selected. Viewed as trustworthy.

I’m in Hawaii with my girlfriend, Taylor Lautnerr says. I’m very tired.

You should rest, I tell him, though I ought not to, not if I want to keep our conversation going. I ask all the questions, and he provides all the answers. I feel sick, and then the nausea passes. Nothing is happening. Nothing did happen. And yet I feel guilty just the same.

ur vry sweet, he types.

I didn’t know you could block people, before he says this.

And then I do.

***I said it was a punishment from God, but that isn’t quite right.

***For the premiere of Eclipse (2010), I attended a midnight showing that included the previous two Twilight films in a long row, with my middle school best friend C., her aunt, and two cousins.

C. was, functionally, an orphan, and I had never felt as close to another person than I had to her. We did everything together, exchanged something like ten thousand text messages a month, and often spent the night in each other’s homes, talking deep into the night. She was blonde, blue-eyed, dainty, already developing a figure that made others jealous — my functional visual opposite. I loomed and towered in comparison. Her hair was silken, thick — I can’t describe it very well, even now, but I remember the feel of it in my hands as I twisted it into a braid.

That night, we squirmed in our seats through the second half of New Moon, ready for the show.

What I remember most is how after, we’d make fun of Bella, her odd declarations, twisting moue.

What I remember most is the shadow that lived in the back of their house, how I hated to be there alone. The way it wanted me to see it. All the things I shouldn’t have known.

***Which is to say, I remember Twilight Mania well, and perhaps might have even gone manic myself, if such forms of idolatry were not forbidden to me. Still, I remember ripping through each volume like mad, even bringing Breaking Dawn along with me to sit in a cold tower of a hospital with my mother, waiting for my grandfather to come out of his port installation surgery.

Why had he gotten cancer? The years of smoking, perhaps. The extreme poverty of his youth, and the continuing poverty of his adulthood. The workman jobs, the asbestos, the Round-Up. The poisoned wells in high oil country. The trauma.

And yet, I thought of none of this, only Edward, only Bella, only the way I wished to remove myself from my life, go anyplace, anywhere.

Be anything.

***I don’t know when, exactly, I discovered Fanfiction Dot Net, just that when I did, my life changed, opened up, cracked open. I didn’t know people were allowed to write about things like that — blood and sex and fear and hate, though of course I had an oblique idea of the kind of freedom adult life could bring, were you someone else.

Edward/Bella brought suitable, if not very exciting results. Bella/Alice was a little better. Rosalie/Bella, better than that.

Edward/Jacob, well. It went on and on and on.

***Before my father died — picture it, that half-empty tower, the mask and the gloves and the apron and the hair net for hair — my pervasive misery and the way I knew I’d make someone laugh with it later. The ghost I talked to in the hall, and the way I chuckled, though never in that room.

She says, Dad (and I snort through my nose), you have to tell us. Is there anyone else?

What she means is: Are there any more children? Any more wretches? Who else have you abandoned for the bottle and the pipe and the women with box blonde hair and rashed mouths? You don’t have much time left, old man, so think carefully.

Chest recently cracked open, hollow circles under his eyes, still too big and long for the bed they have him in, he manages to look offended. Thoughtful. Of course not, he says, pissily. It’s just you, and then, he says our brother’s name. And then he thinks. A long, long pause, long enough I can feel the guffaw building in my chest, no other word for it.

And? She looks at him, looks at me. Looks at me again. I look at the ceiling.

And Autumn, she says, finally.

Oh yes, our father says. And Autumn.

Later in the week, after he almost fails to wake up from anesthesia, he beckons me to come closer. I flinch, and then sit with the table between us.

Do you feel Indian? he says. And it is this line from him I will remember the rest of my life, that I will fold into draft after draft, essay after essay, waiting for it to sing. To matter.

Of course not, I think. How could I. How could I.

Sometimes, I say.

Sometimes.

***And yet I perhaps never felt less Native than those span of months I consumed each medium of Twilight, the books, the films, the soundtrack, the grainy stills of that perfectly lit and aesthetic first movie. Listened to Robert Pattinson sing unintelligibly, “She was standing there by the broken tree / Her hands are all twisted, she’s pointing at me.”

I wanted to be pale and pure. I wanted to be dead but alive. I was already chocolate eyed and raven haired, but it was not enough. I wanted to be remade. In the fantasies I concocted, long narratives wherein I found myself to avoid sleep, and thus my dreams, and thus my actual forays into another place, this world but not, I was Emmett and Rosalie’s daughter, I was a kind of Cullen. I was older than twelve years. More mature. Deadly. Perfect. Free. Steeped in melodrama, the kind that I once thought was important.

In my fantasies, I was protected, cherished, important.

In my fantasies, I —

***I was, however, never a werewolf, though occasionally I imagined myself in love with one of them.

Love, between a boy and a girl to me, was something I could never identify, though if I was capable of classifying it I would have said it was much like what I had felt for my 14-year-old step-cousin Riley the summer we had driven down to Florida for a terrible week. A haunted admiration. An older, wiser being I admired. No physicality except a pat on the head, a little roughhousing. The way boys could be sweet if they wanted nothing from you. The way they could be cruel in the same measure.

***I tell Stef this essay surprised me. It was supposed to be funny and not sad, I said. I told them the story of how it came to be. A series of recollections. A pastiche of experience, the kind that those who enjoy my work find comfort in.

I tell them I might have been a Twihard, were such idols not forbidden.

You’re better off for it, I think, they say. I’m kinda glad you had to do it in secret and couldn’t let it consume you.

Yes, I say. I had more esoteric interests at play, certainly.

***Sometimes, now, when I can’t sleep, I reach back into the past.

It’s easier than you think. Or perhaps it’s only easy for me, one of those things I take for granted.

Still, if we went back together, what would we see?

The dirt roads. The trees. The vines. Spectral glimpse of air.  Myself, tucked into bed, eyes darting to the dark corners, sensing something. Something. Someone.

I close my eyes. I go somewhere else.

It’s not so bad there.