When I was in third grade, Mrs. Horowitz’s divided the class into five groups of five and assigned each cluster a country. I wanted Sweden because I loved the big yellow cross on the their blue flag. It made Sweden look so strong and official. I also loved Swedish meatballs and every really hot girl in my dad’s Playboy listed her nationality as Swedish or Scandinavian. I got Japan. And I was also picked as the leader of our group, a position I felt I could not uphold. At eight, I was already feeling the pressure of stress and constraint. I didn’t have time to be a leader. I needed all of my energy to hide from my domineering mother, to read Charlie Brown books, and just like him, good grief, I needed time to sulk.

Norridge, IL.  I received only one Christmas present from my grandmother and I’m fairly certain it was a timely mistake. Mom, sissy and I stopped by a week before the festive holiday, one we’d never spent together. My grandparents were always with Uncle Jersey and his four ghostly children who clung to the drapes whenever our car pulled into the driveway. We shared the same thoughts with our cousins, wondering who would possibly want to visit their family. Not us. His house was an hour away and we went there infrequently—only to get money he owed my dad or to see if we could rescue one of the dogs he’d inevitably shoot because one of his kids forgot to turn off the television.

Me and Jenna would twist dandelion necks into love knots and slide them down our fingers. This secret ceremony honored boys we wanted to kiss. Ooh-la-la. We love David and he loves us, and we have the hollow wedding rings to prove it. Love you forever. Marry us. Come to the field. We would collapse into the grass, fanning out our arms and legs and make hairy green angels; the same kind we’d made in the snow for the boy we loved last winter, Timothy.

10:44 pm, Kenyon

All the houses are sleeping. The grass is full of blond reeds. It’s smooth and tough and bends like my hair when I was seventeen. If you stare at the hay, you can’t help but see a pile of stray farm girls. It’s so quiet. For a moment, this feels like home.

Between our back fence and Yolanda ’s apartment, was a thin tangled path that opened into acres of high grass.  We called this place, the Field, where neighborhood kids played ball.  My mom picked wild strawberries in the Field, sometimes enough for eight jars of jam we’d help her smash and stir. I collected caterpillars in the Field.  The Field was our place to sink into tall weeds, making green angels with our arms and legs, looking up at the sun, wondering how many hours were left in summer, to splash in the pool, to catch pond frogs with our bobby socks.  And then the bearded man showed up and changed everything.