I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.

We have work to do if you are not to be a total failure like high-waisted, acid-wash jeans.

Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself?

When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt.

I'm going to eviscerate you and leave your organs on a pike in the yard as a warning to those who wear large jewelry.

It's only his thumb brushing slowly across the lower edge of my lip, but it's as if time slows and the sweep of that thumb below my mouth takes forever. It is no spell that I know of, but it holds such magic, I can scarcely breath. He pulls his hand away fast, aware of what he's done. But his touch lingers.

Come awake, Tom. Fathers can willfully hurt their children. They can be addicts too weak to give up their vices, no matter the pain it causes. Mothers can turn you invisible with neglect. They can erase you with a denial, a refusal to see. Friends can deceive you. People lie. It is a cold, hard world. I do not blame Nell Hawkins for retreating from it into a madness of her own choosing.