My High School Girlfriend Became America’s Most Wanted Drug Queenpin

I lost my virginity to the baddest goth girl at theater camp. When I tracked her down fifteen years later I discovered just how dangerous Liz Barrer really was.

Illustrations by Anna Deflorian | Edited by Lilly Dancyger

Nicole: boy i bet she is making her parents PROUD....not!
Steven: dam she is hot
Victoria: Shes pretty indeed...its a sham she choose to be a criminal insteed...
Shaun: DOES SHE SWALLOW?
Ron: I would be her partner any day what a hottie
Erik: She was killed

By the time I read these Facebook comments I was one-hundred percent obsessed with and embroiled in the story of Elizabeth Barrer — the girl I’d once cared for deeply, the girl I hadn’t seen for exactly half the time I’d been alive and yet thought more about than almost anything else.

I had just turned thirty and was doing what one does after a big birthday: lamenting my failures. My life felt like a solid C+ and to make it worse I started obsessively stalking old friends’ Facebook pages, finding nothing but achievements and milestones. I’d been hoping for failures and tribulations, for any excuse I could find to grade my life on a curve. I began to focus on people I knew from the sleepaway performing arts summer camp I went to when I was fourteen. The theater-focused program boasted famous alumni in film, on the stage and even in the music world: your Strokes drummers and Maroon Five singers, your Broke Girls, your baby Cosettes from the 28th revival of “Les Miserable,” they all attended.

Soon I realized that I was looking for someone in particular. She was one of the “goths.” At camp this meant two things: she wore black clothes and only ever signed up for Dungeons and Dragons. For two summers I signed up for multiple sessions of Dungeons and Dragons every day for eight weeks and never played a single game. Instead, I followed around Liz Barrer. She wore a pair of tight black jeans and a baggy white-v neck t-shirt meant for boys. Sometimes she wore a pair of electric blue bondage pants, a style choice that looked ridiculous on nearly every human being in history other than Liz. Her hazel/green eyes were like floodlights beaming out at you if she deigned to look your way. She had a pronounced smile that always seemed to hold shape on her face even when she wasn’t actually smiling. I was completely transparent about my feelings for Liz. It was almost a joke. I was the spiky-haired puppy that followed Liz around all day, despite that fact that she made it painfully clear that I didn’t stand a chance.

By the time fall came around, I’d almost accepted my disqualification from the race for Liz’s heart. I was back in the real world trying to establish my identity in a new high school but camp was always on the periphery. A marble notebook in my bedroom had the phone numbers of all my camp friends. I spent most nights in my room with the phone receiver to my ear, talking to Liz, although I’d given up on trying to change her mind about me. To this day I have no idea why she did.

We were on the phone when she told me that she wanted to “do it” sooner or later and she had decided she wanted it to be with me because she felt comfortable with me. Of course, this would be my first time too. I don’t know if she thought about what her matter-of-fact declaration would mean to me, but I can still remember the way I felt when she told me. I felt considered. I felt chosen. You don’t get a lot of moments like that as a kid. You don’t get a lot of moments like that period.

I don’t remember much about that weekend, which six or so of us spent in the basement of Elle Goldberg, another friend from camp who was close with Liz. I remember almost everything about the room and the bed Liz and I slept in. I remember waking up next to her the morning after, hugging her and then her groaning my name, “Reeeeissss,” annoyed that I’d woken her up. I don’t remember feeling any different having “done it,” only a kind of pride that she was the one it was with. She was beautiful and she was tough. She was elusive. Turns out I had no idea how much so.

When I searched for her fifteen years after that weekend, I discovered that Liz had no Facebook page. She had no MySpace account, Snapchat, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest… fucking Friendster! Maybe she just didn’t like social media. Maybe she’d turned luddite or anarchist, hippie or Christian. But searches brought back no results. There were no articles about her achievements or performances or arrests or DUI’s or business dealings. No candid party photos, no Livejournals, no senior thesis, nothing! Liz was a digital ghost, and this realization led me to assume that one of two things had happened to her: she was either immensely fulfilled or terribly miserable. She was either famous and successful living a quiet, untethered life, or something was wrong. Figuring out which was the truth would slowly overtake my life.