People like to say children are cruel, but that is not entirely true.
Children are honest before they learn mercy.
At first, they asked questions.
“Does it hurt?”
“Can you feel it?”
“Were you on fire?”
“Will it ever go away?”
Then adults shushed them, and the questions became silence.
Silence was worse.
Silence let imagination grow teeth.
By high school, no one openly bullied me. Not exactly. They did something more careful than cruelty. They made room for me without including me. They moved around me as if I were a fragile object on a shelf. They smiled politely. They never picked the seat beside mine unless there was no other chair. They never asked to borrow lip gloss or take selfies or braid my hair in the locker room before games.
I existed.
That was all.
So when prom season arrived, I told my mother I did not want to go.
We were in the kitchen when I said it.
The new kitchen.
The rebuilt one with white cabinets, a fire alarm in every corner, and a stove my mother checked three times every night before going to bed. The walls had been painted a warm yellow because she said yellow made people believe in morning.
