I am eight. I am eight, and I am an avocado in a flock of magpies and I want to be a magpie so badly that it makes my fingers curl. I want to know what it feels...
I’d be lying if I said my interest in forensic psychology wasn’t partially fueled by a need to prove I no longer feared men like him, at least in the beginning,...
Fear silences our voices and daily we convince ourselves that life is fixable, that it gets better and becomes whole again. But the fact is that it doesn’t, at ...
My friend, however, already had a concrete notion what the pronoun "it" did. Rather than calling the rape—the one I had experienced months earlier—by its name, ...
But I only knew the mechanics of sex, not its consequences. Who does at thirteen?
It’s got to be near three in the morning and my head still stirs with all the alcohol I had helped myself to. The alcohol I didn’t buy but paid for. Dearly.
TRIGGER WARNING: This #MeToo essay contains references to child sex trafficking and its effects on the writer. You will cry and, bit by bit, it will break your ...
Soon enough it’s clear he’s hellbent on spreading the rumor he fucked you—or is it fact? You’re a 13-year-old freshman who drank a pint of Southern Comfort, bla...
My mom tells me that I can choose who can come to my party. I can choose who can have cake. Tomorrow when I turn thirteen I will tell her that he can’t come to ...
I felt terror but not complete surprise. For a long while, part of me had expected to die like this. I recollected the stories my great-grandmother read from th...
He was a lurker, an expert lurker, my grandfather. He lurked in the dark, and during the day he lurked in empty corners. My earliest memory is of him, sitting o...
he Julie B Valentine Center is located out on the edge of town near trucking depots and used car lots that cater exclusively to Spanish-speaking customers. The ...
