Sickened
The True Story of a Lost Childhood
Chapter One
The part I hated most was the shaving.
I mean, if you're a twelve-year-old girl, how much hair can you have
on your chest? But they'd lather me up anyway and run a new plastic
Bic between my barely-there breasts. They needed me smooth and
hairless so the little white pads would stick to those points
constellated around my heart and record my beats. And while they
were preparing, I'd hover above myself, intent on studying the nubby
white ceiling tiles, imagining a room where I lived, inverted, upon
the ceiling, away from the clutter of our trailer, away from the
hospital-just floating in pure, white peace.
The scent of the shaving cream pulls me back down from the ceiling:
It's the same kind Dad used. Every day before dawn, he'd erupt in
violent heaving and crawl off to the toilet trying to peel the Agent
Orange from his lungs. Sometimes the sounds of his retching would
come out the mouths of those elusive figures in my dreams, the
worlds between sleep and wake merging seamlessly for a few groggy
moments. He'd usually shave after he puked.
In an unspoken und ... read full excerpt from: Sickened ebook
