Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone nowhere, despite the fifteen-hundred miles there and back. The small Texas town that introduced me to God. And ripped Him away. Taught me to pray, but not the right way. At school, which doubled as a church, they taught me to count to tan and how to trace letters and how to sit still and not interrupt. On the weekends my mom would watch me walk home along the moonlit sidewalk from Brooke’s house when I was too scared of her attic to spend the night. I couldn’t help but imagine a man behind the door, wielding an axe, waiting for me to fall asleep. And it was there I learned people could be their own biggest enemy. I still remember when the boy who bullied my big sister in math class hanged himself with the dress code in the seventh-grade bathroom. By the time I got there, belts were no longer required. So my jeans would ride down and I had to wear a stupid polo t-shirt and I was learning about the Alamo and Davy Crockett and my mind lingered every time I walked past that bathroom.
When the cold fronts came and made the grass frozen and crunchy in the early mornings it was especially hard to go to school. Brooke and I would wait for the bus in front of my house with our little siblings bundled up so tight they couldn’t move their arms. Watching the end of the street I would will the bus to turn the corner and come rescue us from the chill but seconds felt like minutes felt like eternity. Then the warm fronts collided with the cold and made the weather bad, they taught us which parts of our body are the weakest. Huddle in the hallway, cover your stomachs and the back of your necks. I wished away the clouds that brought the storms that made the tornados that sounded the sirens that made me think about how vulnerable my organs are. In the summertime, my friends and I would walk to the pool only to discover hundreds of June bugs on the water’s surface. The dry side of things wasn’t much better, mosquitos the size of a pinky finger’s tip would swarm and leave large, itchy boils on my arms and legs. And if you weren’t careful and stepped on an ant mound, fire ants would crawl up your leg mercilessly ripping into you. So we would turn around, abandoning the bugs for a Disney Channel original movie and a tub of Dibs.▲
