I was careful to leave out some things as well, like how the weather was the worst because there was almost always something wrong with it, either too hot or too cold, the hurricanes and stuff. That the house we lived in wasn’t even like the ones we’d seen on TV when we were little, how it wasn’t made of bricks but planks, a house made of planks in America, and how when it rained those planks got mold and smelled. I didn’t tell them how in the summer nights there sometimes was the bang-bang-bang of gunshots in the neighborhood and I had to stay indoors, afraid to go out, and how one time a
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