Fighting makes her feel powerful. It distracts from other feelings—from what she will learn, years from now, to call “being vulnerable.” “Cuz I don’t like to be nice, cuz then kids take advantage,” she tells me during a lunch break. Some feelings, she reserves for her poems, most recently, one she calls “Alone”: I cry all day Couldn’t find land Nowhere to stand On a boat without a friend Sharks trying to eat me I’m dead again Dasani continues to see her counselor at school, Roxanne. They meet to play Mancala and to talk about “anger management”—a concept that Dasani finds odd. She does not
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