My mom wants to know how I feel. “Fine,” I say. I feel nothing I can share. All the feelings are drowned out anyway by the clamoring adults—those who want to know the secrets and those who want to keep them. The ones who want to sell us our fears, and the ones who want to believe such fears don’t exist. All of them making up the rules. None of them listening to us. I feel like I want to scream, but I’m not supposed to. If I must, I can whisper to a therapist, a keeper of secrets who will deposit my feelings in a vault with the others, because the side I’m on is the side that’s been chosen for
...more
