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up the street looking for someone to play with. When you saw everybody congregated around the front steps of Tim Kelly's house your heart rejoiced at the prospect of shared fun. But why were they all looking at that big book? And why were their eyes darting back and forth mischievously between you and the book?

It was only when they all began dancing around as you stepped into the yard, singing out the word CAU-CA-SION slowly, and then swiftly repeating twice CAUCASION, CAUCASION accompanied by sharp hand claps that you realized they'd been looking at a dictionary. These were your classmates. Your parents knew their parents. You were not a stranger. So when you approached you had no reason to think anything was out of place. Your innocence was clean and open. So when they drove this spear into your heart without cause you were so simultaneously astonished and crushed that you wordlessly turned around and went home so they couldn't see your tears and humiliation. This was the prototype event out of which others of its kind will reproduce as you grow up. It gets worse in the short run, not better.

For a long time you will believe that you've been cursed in some unfathomable way. This belief alone will rape your sense of fairness on a regular basis and you will choke on this poison many times, carrying within yourself a constant scream of why that nobody else will hear. But that is all you need to know about that. It is enough to know, as I said, the principle that future events will grow out of.

The assaults you will suffer because of the way you look will cause you to be filled with bitterness beyond words. Blessedly it will not make you a bitter person. Despite our faults, and they are many, you will never desire to visit the same pain on anyone that you were subjected to. Yet be prepared for the truth of the adage that when it rains, it pours. For in the midst of your teenage years when you're dealing with typical teenage turmoil on top of the painful consciousness of your appearance your parents divorce after years of discord. You will see it as the final fall of a crumbling edifice you had always hoped could be restored. Yet that alone won't be the cruelest blow. Your father will set things up so that you and your sister must testify in court against your mother. The inner death you die because of that could only be expressed if the rocks cried out. It will be that all that can contain your pain is silence, and if there is anything you'll learn it's how to

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