When I was a girl, my mother was always on the phone. I played hide and go seek with the neighborhood boys. I hid in bushes, in cupboards, my limbs contorting around my body like cobwebs. Hours would pass and no one would find me. I was the missing girl plastered on every stop sign down Main Street. I was a specter. A saint. My first field trip was to an art museum. Saint Lucy served her eyes to me on a platter, knife still in her hand. My own lemonade hair glinting back in the blade. I watched Yulia Lipnitskaya skate in the Sochi Olympics. I traced figure eights around my father’s absence, my short-program set to my mother screaming into the landline. I watched movies in my mother’s bedroom, cross-legged on the untouched side of the bed. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted wrists that smelled like watermelons and teeth as white as a nuclear flash. I tried to make absence into a kind of beauty. Cities leveled within seconds. Saint Lucy’s empty sockets. In my dreams, I saw my father in the park, buying Italian ice in a polo as yellow as joy. In my dreams, the phone rang and rang and rang. I liked to think of prayer as a kind of missed call. My first role was as Ophelia in my high school’s production of Hamlet. I stared into the stage lights until flowers bloomed at the edges of my vision. Whiter than Hiroshima. Whiter than snow. I once loved a boy for an entire year without touching him. I once loved a boy who could figure skate, who spun in the air like sugar. I once loved a boy who never picked up my calls. Nowadays, he pays to see my face in movie theaters. I can’t win hide and go seek anymore. Skinny journalists in scaly black dresses open the cupboard and ask me about my childhood. I tell them this: Once, I was watching a movie on my mother’s bed and she muted the TV to call Lucy, my father’s secretary. I heard her voice from her bathroom---you fucking whore, I’m going to claw your eyes out---and watched the women in the movie smile, their silent bodies barreling towards me.