Late one night, I took my braces off in front of the huge mirror in the tiny efficiency apartment I shared with my grandmother. I was 11--my teeth looked straight to me. I didn't want to go back, so I smiled big with the door shut, yanked and twisted and pulled until the wire came out. Took my big silver spoon and chipped off the brackets, one by one, on each tooth. The cement was there for years.

He took me to the park when I was seven to suck on a line of boys, tall teenagers, the first one a neighborhood bully that scared me and was big and blond and older than me by several years. I stood under the bridge that crossed the storm runoff creek, looking at that line of boys, and I said no, I can't.

This is the 50 year old dad of a messed up junkie neighbor. She beat her kids,all three of them, but I didn't register that at the time. I babysat for her. One night her dad came over. I was 12. He combed my hair.