The beginning of the end started the summer before senior year. Seventeen years old—a record year for me. I was just a girl. The only Milan on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Being the only anything in New York was rare. Like all girls, I had a secret. Being deaf was something I found easier to deal with when fewer people knew, so just before starting a new high school and after Mama’s accident, I reinvented myself. I left my hearing aid at home permanently, which made it difficult at times because I only had partial hearing in one ear to start with. Without my hearing aid, I really was in complete silence. Yet I had other skills that allowed me to communicate just fine. It wasn’t too soon after I started high school that I began modeling, and, well, the world looked at me in a way I sort of liked. But love—that was what confused me the most. I had found myself in a boy craze of the most peculiar predicament, in a tangled web that nearly took me under. They never warn you about love, and no magazine could ever do it justice.