Nick had shaggy blond hair, painted his nails with Wite-Out, and wore a silver hoop earring in one ear. In class, he was quiet and terribly slow, like he was stoned all the time. He was constantly asking me when assignments were due and if he could borrow my notes, hapless requests that I deftly roped into my private mission to befriend him. In middle school Nick had a band called the Barrowites. I didn’t know anyone who played in a band, and it felt impossibly cool that Nick already had one. They put out one EP before disbanding, which I diligently hunted down from a friend of a friend. It was a burned disc folded inside a homemade paper envelope with drawings and titles written in Sharpie. As soon as I got home I slipped the disc into the boom box I kept on my desk. I sat on a rolling chair and listened, still holding the paper envelope in my clammy hands as I pored over the lyrics, imagining Nick Hawley-Gamer’s wildly sexually experienced past. There were five tracks, the last a song called “Molly’s Lips.” I wondered if Molly was another one of his many exes, or if it was perhaps a pseudonym for Maya Brown. I was too stupid to know that “Molly’s Lips” was actually just a Nirvana cover, and I’d like to think that Nick was at least too stupid to know that Nirvana was covering the Vaselines.

Eventually I worked up enough courage to ask if he wanted to “jam.” We met at lunch under a tree by the soccer fields. It didn’t take long to reveal how horribly inept I was at the guitar. I had never “jammed” with anyone before. Nick would start a song and I’d have no idea what key it was in or how to accompany him. I tried to quietly hunt and peck for the right notes, attempting to hone in on a simple lead line vaguely rooted in the scales I thought I knew, before eventually apologizing and giving up completely. Nick took it in stride. He was patient and nonjudgmental and offered to play along instead to the songs I knew. We spent the rest of lunch trading verses on the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends” and the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” and it felt like the most romantic miracle of my young adult life.

When I had written a few songs of my own, I decided to sign up for an open mic night at Cozmic Pizza, a restaurant downtown with café table seating and a small stage behind the front bar. It had glossy cement floors and high ceilings and usually hosted jazz nights and world music. I invited my friends to watch me play. The place was mostly empty, but still you could barely hear my Costco acoustic over the clanking of pint glasses, the slamming of the pizza oven, and the cashiers calling out names to collect their pies. I was elated by my seven minutes of fame. Because I’d brought a group of friends, the open mic slots slowly transformed into my own sets, opening for small local artists. I took press pictures of myself in my bathroom with a self-timer, scanned them onto my dad’s computer, and used MS Paint to design promotional flyers. I bought a staple gun and hung them on telephone poles around town and asked local businesses if I could tape them up in their windows. I made a Myspace and uploaded the songs I recorded on GarageBand. I emailed the link to local bands and promoters and begged them to add me to their bills. I played high school benefits and developed a small local following, mostly of friends and classmates I pressured into attendance, until finally I was “big enough” to land a slot at the WOW Hall opening for Maria Taylor.

On the day of the show, Nick came early for moral support and waited with me in the greenroom until it was time for my set. I’d never been in a greenroom before, but even so it hardly felt glamorous. The room was brightly lit, closet-sized, with two benches and a mini fridge that sat atop a wooden table. Nick and I were sitting on a bench facing the door when Maria Taylor came in with a flannel-clad bandmate. She was intimidating. Dark, wavy hair framed her intense features, most recognizably her long, prominent nose and willowy figure. I held my breath as she entered. She mumbled, “Where’s the wine?” and then left.

My parents came and stood together in the back. I played about six acoustic songs, seated on a metal fold-out chair, wearing a striped rainbow shirt from Forever 21 with faded flared jeans tucked into brown cowboy boots, an outfit I actually thought made me look cool at the time. By then, thank god, I had at least upgraded to a Taylor acoustic and played out of an SWR strawberry-blond amp I’d chosen solely because I liked the red-and-cream color combo. I fumbled through open chords, using a capo along the neck for each song so I could reuse the same chord shapes. I sang teenage songs about longing for the simpler times, not realizing that’s exactly what these times were supposed to be. When I finished, I got a “Good job, sweetie” from my parents, who generously allowed me to hang around for the rest of the show.

Maria Taylor played a red Gretsch hollow body that looked comically large on her thin frame. I grabbed Nick’s shoulder in excitement as she started the chords to “Xanax,” the lead single off her new record that I’d been putting on all my mixes. The song started like a ticking clock, drumsticks clacking against the snare rim as she cataloged her anxieties and fears. “Afraid of an airplane, of a car swerving in the lane…of the icy mountain roads we have to take to get to the show.” She jolted her torso forward into the last strum, and the members of the band, who’d stood stock-still through the entirety of the first two verses, collapsed in unison into the chorus.

Even as I sang along to a song that specifically addressed the constant challenges of life on tour, even as I watched them play to a small ridge of at best thirty people in a small town they probably regretted booking, witnessing someone who toured the country playing songs they wrote was a revelation. I’d shared a stage with this person, sat two feet away in the same room as them. I had glimpsed the life of an artist, and it felt, for a moment, like a path slightly more within reach.

After the show Nick gave me a ride home in his parents’ Nissan Maxima. He was proud of me, and it felt good that someone I looked up to was seeing me in a new light.

“You should really record an album of all your songs,” Nick said. “You should look into the studio where we recorded the Barrowites.”

The next morning, my mom took me to lunch at Seoul Cafe, the restaurant near the university run by a Korean couple. The husband worked the floor while the wife cooked in the back. Its only fault was that the service was slow, the husband easily flustered when he had more than three tables to deal with. As a work-around, my mother would call on the drive over about halfway between our house and the restaurant and phone in our orders in advance.

“Do you want bibimbap today?” she asked, holding the steering wheel with one hand and searching the contacts of her pink Razr flip phone with the other.

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Ah ne! Ajeossi…?”

Every time my mother spoke Korean, the text sprawled out before me like a Mad Lib. Words that were so familiar mixed with long blanks I couldn’t fill in. I knew she was ordering jjamppong with extra vegetables, because I knew those words and because she always ordered the same thing. If she liked something, she stuck to it, ate it every day, seemingly never tiring of it, until one day she’d just move on inexplicably.

When we arrived, my mother greeted the old man at the counter with a big smile and burst into Korean while I dutifully poured hot tea for us from a large metal urn and placed our napkins, metal spoons, and chopsticks on the table. She paid at the counter, grabbed a Korean magazine from the front, and brought it back to our booth.

“I really like them here but they’re very slow. That’s why Mommy always call ahead,” she whispered.

She flipped through the magazine, drinking her barley tea and taking in the Korean actresses and models. “I think maybe this would be nice hairstyle for you,” she said, pointing at a Korean actress with perfectly neat, wavy tresses. She flipped the page again. “This kind of military jacket is very popular style in Korea now. Mommy want to get you one but you always wear ugly thing.”

The old man wheeled our dishes over on a cart and placed our orders and banchan on the table. The rice at the bottom of my dolsot crackled and my mother’s seafood noodle soup bellowed a steam bath from its bright red surface.

“Masitge deuseyo,” the man said with a slight bow, wishing us a good meal as he pushed his cart back to the counter.

“What’d you think of my show yesterday?” I said, squirting gochujang into my bibimbap.

“Honey, don’t put too much gochujang or it taste too salty,” she said. She swatted my hand away from my bowl. I set down the red squeeze bottle with token obedience.

“Nick said he knows a studio where I could record my songs. I’m thinking since it’s just guitar and vocals, I could record like an album in two or three days. It’d only be like two hundred dollars for the studio time, and then I could burn the discs at home.”

My mother lifted up a long string of noodles, then let them drop back into the broth. She set her chopsticks across the top of the bowl, closed the magazine, and met my eyes across the table.

“I’m just waiting for you to give this up,” she said.

My eyes fell into my rice. I broke my yolk with my spoon and pushed it around the stone bowl over the vegetables. My mother leaned in and began spooning some bean sprout soup into my bibimbap. The liquid sizzled against the sides.

“I should have never let you take guitar class,” she said. “You should be thinking about the colleges, not doing this weird thing.”

I bobbed my left leg up and down nervously, trying not to explode. My mother grabbed my thigh under the table.

“Stop shaking your leg; you’ll shake the luck out.”

“What if I don’t want to go to college?” I said brazenly, wrenching away from her grasp. I shoveled a spoonful of the scalding mixed rice into my mouth, lobbing it around with my tongue, creating an air pocket that let out the steam. My mother looked around the restaurant nervously, as if I had just pledged faith to a satanic commune. I watched her try to collect herself.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to go to college. You have to go to college.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I said. “This weird thing—is the thing that I love.”

“Oh okay, fine then, you go live with Colette!” she erupted. She grabbed her purse and stood, sliding on her oversized sunglasses. “I’m sure she’ll take care of you. You can do whatever you want there and I am so evil.”

By the time I followed her out to the parking lot, she was already in the driver’s seat, using the mirror from the sun flap to pick the gochugaru from her teeth with the folded corner of a receipt. She was waiting for me to stop her—to chase her and beg for forgiveness. But I would not give in. I could live without them, I thought to myself with foolish teenage confidence. I could get a job. I could stay with friends. I could keep playing shows until someday the rooms were full.

My mother crumpled the receipt into the cup holder, closed the mirror, and rolled down her window. I stood still in the parking lot, trying my best not to tremble as she stared me down from behind her dark lenses.

“You want to be a starving musician?” she said. “Then go live like one.”

The allure of life as a starving musician wore off quickly. I stayed with Nicole and Colette a few nights, then with my friend Shanon, who was a year older and had her own place. We hung around at a punk house called the Flower Shop that was basically a glorified squat. Crust punks slept on the floors, hurled glass bottles off the roof into the street, and threw kitchen knives into the drywall when they were drunk.

Without my mother as an anchor, I strayed even further from the responsibilities we’d been arguing about over the past year. The college supplements I needed to complete remained half-finished documents on my father’s desktop computer and I was pulled into a vicious cycle of truancy. I skipped classes, missed assignments, became ashamed I had gotten so far behind, and then kept skipping because I didn’t want to be confronted by the teachers who cared about me. Many mornings I would just sit outside on campus, smoking cigarettes in the high school parking lot, unable to go inside. I fantasized about dying. Every object in the world seemed to become a tool for it. The freeway a place to get pummeled, five stories high enough to jump off. I saw bottles of glass cleaner and wondered how much I’d have to swallow; I thought of hanging myself with the little string that makes window blinds go up and down.

When my midterm report card revealed I was failing all my classes and that my GPA had plummeted, my mother scheduled a meeting with the college counselor and begged for help. Frantically, she gathered the necessary documents, including the scrapped writing supplements, and sent them out to the colleges I had previously shown interest in. When I finally returned home, I began to see a therapist who prescribed medication for some “emotional breathing room” and addressed a letter to accompany my college applications explaining that this shift in mood and performance had been indicative of a mental breakdown.

My remaining months at home were scored by a fraught silence. My mother would drift from room to room rarely acknowledging my presence. When I opted not to attend senior prom, she offered little more than a passing remark, despite the fact we had picked out a dress together nearly a year beforehand.

I yearned for my mother to speak to me but tried to appear stoic, knowing full well my constitution was much weaker than hers. She seemed unfazed by our distance right up until the day I packed to leave for Bryn Mawr, when at last the silence was broken.

“When I was your age I would have died for a mom who bought me nice clothes,” she said.

I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, folding a pair of overalls stitched entirely out of plaid patches I’d bought from Goodwill. I set the overalls inside my bag, alongside my ugly sweater collection and an oversized Daniel Johnston shirt I had cut into a muscle tee.

“I always had to wear Nami’s leftovers and then watch Eunmi get new ones by the time they got to her,” she said. “On the East Coast everyone is going to think you are a homeless person.”

“Well, I’m not like you,” I said. “I have more important things to think about than the way that I look.”

In one fell swoop, my mother gripped me by the hip and spun me around to strike my backside with her palm. It was not the first time my mother had hit me, but as I grew older and bigger, the punishment seemed more and more unnatural. At that point, I weighed more than her, and the strike hardly hurt, aside from the embarrassment of feeling much too old for the practice.

Hearing the commotion, my father made his way up the stairs and looked on from the hallway.

“Hit her!” my mother instructed. He stood still, watching dumbly. “Hit her!” she screamed again.

“If you hit me I’m going to call the police!”

My father grabbed me by the arm and raised his hand, but before he could bring it down, I wriggled out of his grasp, ran to the phone, and dialed 911.

My mother looked at me as if I were a worm, an unfamiliar speck eating away at all her efforts. This was not the girl who clung to her sleeves at the grocery store. This was not the girl who begged to sleep on the floor beside her bed. With the phone to my ear, I stared back at her defiantly, but when I heard a voice on the other end of the line I panicked and hung up. My mother took it as an opportunity to tackle me. She grabbed me by the forearms, and for the first time, we were locked together, wrestling to pin each other to the carpet. I tried to fight her off but discovered there was a physical place I would not go, a strength I knew I had to overtake her but could not access. I let her pin my wrists and climb on top of my stomach.

“Why are you doing this to us? After everything we have given you, how can you treat us this way?” she yelled, her tears and spit falling onto my face. She smelled like olive oil and citrus. Her hands felt soft and slick, greased with cream, as they pushed my wrists against the coarse carpet. The weight of her on me began to ache like a bruise. My father hovered over us, unsure of his place in it all, searching for a reason why a kid like me could wind up so miserable.

“I had an abortion after you because you were such a terrible child!”

Her grip went slack and she shifted her weight off me to leave the room. She let out a little cluck, the kind of sound let out when you think something is a real shame, like passing a dilapidated building with beautiful architecture.

There it was. It was almost comical how she could have withheld a secret so impressive my entire life, only to hurl it at such a moment. I knew there was no way I was truly to blame for the abortion. That she had said it just to hurt me as I had hurt her in so many monstrous configurations. More than anything, I was just shocked she had withheld something so monumental.

I envied and feared my mother’s ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.