from Slurpee and I was wearing my favorite pink SpongeBob shirt as I perused the supermarket’s paperback section. As a 13-year-old raised on a cattle farm, I devoured books obsessively. I stood in fluorescent lighting at the end of a checkout line, my boots caked with mud. Suddenly, the image of a feather-clad half-naked fellow caught my eye from the shelves. Nestled between some Nicholas Sparks novels and glossy magazines, the embossed book cover glistened with a white man in a headband in an unconvincing long black wig, a swooning white woman clutched in his arms, the pair almost kissing in a deluge of feathers. , I remember thinking, lips blue, and I moved on to try to
