A year or so later, a girl awaiting a lung transplant asked to meet me. I spent a couple of hours with her and found myself forgetting the strange premise of why I was there. I liked her. A lot. She was funny and kind and she had a wry sense of humour about her own terrifying predicament. I would have liked to be her friend. The year before my mother died, we had moved from a suburb of Toronto to Aurora, a town which was an hour and a half by bus and subway from the school I went to, and I was never at school long enough to really maintain friendships throughout the year. I was under the impression that this girl would live, that we would talk often, but maybe I just didn’t ever ask anyone what her prognosis was. One day I called her to check in, and she was gone. Her father sent me a T-shirt with her face on it. I sat alone in my room for a long time.

The pain and sadness this left me with gradually twisted itself into anger. I started to see injustice everywhere. The technical crew, who generally showed me more compassion and kindness than anyone else on set, and who clearly had far more experience and expertise than the people they worked under, had no meaningful say in the show’s creation and were treated with noticeable disrespect by producers and some of the show’s directors. Many of the crew worked such long hours that they would talk about falling asleep and swerving off the road, or not seeing their children at all during the week because they left for work so early their kids were still sleeping and returned home long after they had gone to bed. I saw elderly background performers moved unceremoniously out of lunch lineups to make way for the show’s “stars,” including myself, after they had spent twice the time outside as everyone else, in thin period costumes, in sub-zero temperatures. Sometimes even the food they ate was different from ours, cheaper and less healthy. I became aware of a pecking order, one that I was near the top of, at least superficially. When I behaved in a bratty manner, no one held me accountable. But no one in charge seemed to care if I became so exhausted from work that I spiked a fever, or that I didn’t get time off after my mother’s death, either. Daily, I was fed a toxic concoction of coddling and neglect, which, unsurprisingly, did not bring out the best in me.

After years of clearing the land and cultivating it, the settlers in PEI were still paying rents to absentee landlords in Britain. The Tenant League was formed to support farmers who began to refuse to pay their rents. When the sheriffs came to arrest those farmers, neighbours would blow tin trumpets to alert supporters across the countryside. Sometimes dozens of people would answer the trumpet calls and arrive to surround the farmer in question, preventing his arrest. Finally, British troops were called in, but most of them were Irish, and when they arrived many found themselves siding with the tenant farmers. Though the rebellion was ultimately crushed, and the history of the Tenant League remains largely unknown in Canada, it had a profound influence on the Island. To this day in PEI, the acquisition of land by non-residents is highly regulated.