She was passing down something about the world to me just then—the world as she found it and survived it, ever since her mother died. She’d been trying to escape for a long time. Not just the man who had grabbed her on the bicycle as a child, or the street louses she had to fight off on her way home from school, but eventually the advances of her own grandfather from whose drunken fondling she ran away. This she would only tell me about years later. The world that sent her running and hiding from unwanted hands and mouths and tongues was the same one I now moved through—and she expected
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