As long as you pay your rent, I dont 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 Ive been living on the top floor of a three-story walk-up next to the downtown movie theater. Its 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? Im still in junior high, with no job and no parent nearby. I dont 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 months 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 wasnt 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 wouldnt 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 to play the leading role in her low-budget indie film about her own life. For this, I won the Canadian equivalent of an Academy Award and earned the princely sum of $12,000, and two years later I still have a fair chunk of that left.

Im hoping this will lead to a career as a famous movie star, which is why I was on a trip just before I got evicted. Id flown to Seattle for a casting call for a big Hollywood feature film about a family that adopts a bigfoot. In the audition, I had to throw a hissy fit because the creature ate my 15th birthday corsage (not that Ive ever been in the same room as a corsage). Dont get excited. Its a long shot, I tell myself. I am not rich or famous (yet!) but I also am not broke, a fact with material implications for how this story unfolds.

The answer about my parents will have to be a little longer. Ive got them, just not in the vicinity. My mother lives with my little sister in Vancouver. I lived there with them too until the age of 12, when my mom and I arrived at the shared conclusion that wed both be happier if I went to live with my dad.

So, at the start of seventh grade, I moved into my fathers bungalow in Red Deer, Alberta, a prairie town with one water tower, two shopping malls and not much to do for fun except drink, fuck and fight. My dad was the kind of gregarious good-time guy whos always jingling his pocket change and striking up conversations. More of a roommate than a parent, he gave me free rein to come and go as I pleased, which made it easy for me to pursue my passions. Chiefly, these included smoking weed in my friends garages, hanging out by the Pac-Man machine in the 7-Eleven, and trying to find out where the partys at and who I could catch a ride with.

For two years, my father and I coexisted relatively peacefully like this, moving in wide orbits around each other.

Around the time he was pushing 50, my dad got itchy feet. He bought himself a used Honda 650 Nighthawk, fitted it with saddlebags, and started taking weekend trips into the Rocky Mountains. He stuck a map of the U.S. on the kitchen corkboard and, with pencils and pins, plotted out routes that snaked past all the famous landmarks and national parks. One of these days, he said. Only one thing stood between him and this once-in-a-lifetime adventure: his parental obligation to me.

As a precocious 14-year-old, I harbored the common adolescent delusion that I was smarter and more mature than any adult. So once I got wind of my fathers easy-rider dreams, I campaigned hard to convince him that I was more than ready to live independently now. I mostly fixed my own meals already. I got myself up and off to school each day. I knew how to push a cart around a grocery store and pay a bill. Whats the worst that could happen?