I practice punching at the kitchen table. I practice on the couch. I practice in my sleep. I make a fist and see my life there. I make a fist and study the veins that press out against the skin of my forearms. Hating your hate of love, I practice punching at the kitchen table.

I have learned not to get burned.

The year that I turn sixteen, which is a very long year, I often work the opening shift at McDonald’s. Other than babysitting, this is my first job, and I take it quite seriously. Twenty hours a week; more in the summer. I have no license, so my mother drives me, both of us heavy with the want of sleep.

“How fat do I look in this shirt?” my mother asked me, grimacing as she stared at herself in the department store’s tri-fold mirror. All three versions of her fussed in unison with the shirt’s delicate buttons.

By the time I was in the sixth grade, this was not an unusual question. “Mother,” I started, my voice lingering on the last syllable, dragging the er into a nasal whine. “You look fine.” 

I couldn’t make myself heard for fifty years. Not even the boy could hear me, the boy I lived inside. My vocal anatomy worked fine—larynx, mouth, lungs beneath my breasts—I just didn’t have the words. Nobody did, not in the sixties. I had to resort to signals. Most of them he missed.