I wish America would stop judging and criticizing teens and instead, try to understand the battles they have to fight every day.

I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care.

Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.

I pushed my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand crushed bleeding lips pushed back at me.

So, she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.