I will never forget the first day of freshman English,when my teacher mentioned she was vegetarianand a pimpled boy in an orange-billed Giants cap asked whyin the way onlyat the same time—and the teacher paused, considering,on the brink of some cliff I couldn’t see, before she explained,matter-of-factly, under the pulsating fluorescent lights,how her older brother’s friend raped her when she wasour age, and the next day, as she watched her motherprepare a chicken for dinner, she felt exactly like the deadbird—fridge cold and raw—and as her motherseparated thigh from breast, our teacher decidedshe would never eat meat again. As you might expect,a roomful of fourteen-year-olds did not know howto respond, could only open and close their mouths like goldfishin fishbowls, the kind who seem to only float.Our teacher calmly moved on, discussing the year’srequired reading—Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter—but I was too absorbed with all she’d said and carriedwhich seemed suspended in the air, as if it were dust—impossible to see until it settles on a hard surface—and for the first time I understood the pastand present to be impossibly bound, interlockinglinks of a thin chain we each wear around our necks.When the bell rang, my classmates may have returnedto the same world they’d known, but the world I enteredthrough the standard corridor was irrevocably altered,sharpened and equally blurred, just as it waslast night, when we were all bound to the radio,listening to the testimony we knew too well.I was preparing dinner, my hands busy pulling outthe chicken’s packaged neck and giblets—wrapped carefully in plastic, then tucked backinto the cavity where her small bird heart once beat—and I couldn’t stop remembering the boys’ laughter,all the times we’ve been a meal for someone’s awful hunger.
