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I wasn’t immune to finding power sexy. I’d gone out with men because I was impressed by their jobs, thought about leaving men and then remembered their jobs. I told myself that this wasn’t a shallow train of thought, it was actually a tribute to a man’s character: the position he held said somethin…

I still wanted to know that the articles were being published, and in large quantities, but reading stories of abuse and humiliation, like the big Bill Cosby exposé from a few years back, was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn’t feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless. I wanted to watch the patr…

“Let him come,” I said to my friend. “If we refuse to speak of him, we give him the power of our childhood phantasms. The enemy has revealed himself. Now we can fight.”

“You are a white girl in the park on acid,” he said. “On the border, they are building camps.”

I put my foot out sharply and…

That November, the earth opened and we fell through the cracks, picking up speed. It wasn’t one big hole but endless small ones, like gas coming up through the tundra, or like our house in the Valley with its network of hidden fissures that opened up one day twenty years after the earthquake. Broke…

We had no response to Superking Son, partly because of his crazed logic, but mostly because we didn’t agree with him. It was real work to do well in school. And weren’t we supposed to want what Justin’s family had? Weren’t we supposed to go to college and become pharmacists? Wasn’t that what our pa…