I joined the impromptu clique of smokers outside the coffee shop and slid into a conversation about tiny houses and woodstoves, teepees and yurts, composting toilets. Some dreadlocked white boy just off the Appalachian Trail was rambling happy about his tarps and tents and his buddy’s yurt, and I let him pronounce it App-a-lay-shun because […]

Our lives were horror stories, but we didn’t know it. We were the figures that stalked the nightmares of middle- and upper-middle-class parents. Some of us were the brave young black men first eaten by the monster; others, the virginal Final Girls pure enough to survive until the end. We were the big-haired bombshells who…