Appa explained to me that, as a girl, I had to understand my fragility. Danger lurked on every corner. It would be easy, he said, for people to snatch me up from the sidewalk on my way home from school. For them to do terrible things to me. Yet I took no stock in his words, believing that his fears were overblown. Nobody looked at me when I walked alone. Nobody paid me any attention. I was so convinced of my invulnerability that, even when I thought about George, about what I wanted to do to him, I never considered what he could do to me. I stop dead in my tracks, my pulse quickening. What if
...more
