“As long as you pay your rent, I don’t care how old you are.”
At barely 15 years old, I am pretty sure my signature has no lawful place on this rental agreement. But I need somewhere to live, and this guy is dumb or desperate enough to give me the keys to this apartment in exchange for $350 a month that, by some miracle, he trusts I am good for. (He is right.)
I ink my name onto the form in loopy, girlish script and hand it to him. Thank fuck. I have to move out of my old place in less than a week, and now I have somewhere to go.
For most of the past year I’ve been living on the top floor of a three-story walk-up next to the downtown movie theater. It’s a pretty nice apartment. A two-bedroom with lots of light and wall-to-wall carpeting.
The new place is a bit shittier — a dank, one-bedroom basement suite that smells like Lysol and sweaty boots. Looking out the living room window, I am eye level with muddy brown grass and the busy street beyond. Still, I am pretty damn proud of myself for finding it, and prouder yet for persuading the building manager to rent it to me.
Honestly, I can hardly believe he went for it. What was he thinking? I’m still in junior high, with no job and no parent nearby. I don’t exactly look like a fine, upstanding young lady, either, in my skintight jeans, heavy metal band T-shirt, and thick black eyeliner — the unofficial uniform of 1980s crime-curious mall rats. But I do happen to have a few thousand dollars of my own, and as I write a check for the deposit and first month’s rent, carefully tearing its perforated edge and peeling it off the checkbook, I feel myself grow a little taller. What could be more grown-up than putting a roof over your own head? I feel like a small-town, underage Mary Tyler Moore, making it after all.
I wasn’t expecting to have to find a place to live all by myself. One week ago I came home from a trip to find that my key wouldn’t turn in the lock. A piece of green paper was stuck to my door, headed “Notice of Eviction.” Under “Reason for Eviction,” the box beside “Noise Complaints” was checked, which seemed kind of unfair since no one had ever complained to me about the noise. I had 15 days to move out.
This might be a good time to explain how I came to be in this situation — living alone at 15 with money to spend on an apartment but no parents.
The short answer regarding the money is that I starred in a movie when I was 13 years old. My childhood neighbor had cast me…
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