2. INTROS
Ten years ago, I was a spy.
Secret identities, awesome spy gadgets and
undercover operations consumed my imagination.
This was serious business and l took training
seriously.
My brother was Public Enemy No.1. He’d come home
and I’d use Mission Impossible stealth moves to follow
him everywhere. I’d pick his bedroom door with a
nail file and steal his allowance. I’d climb the tree
outside his window and take reconnaissance photos.
4. INTROS
Like most babies, I was born with straight, glassy hair, plastered to the
sides of my head and as soft as the down feathers of a magpie. I
gurgled, and cried, and groped for things with little fingers, and,
within three months, I was bald. The next nine months saw me
through my first smiles, the discovery of my feet, the echoing peals of
unsullied laughter that bubbled from my lips like liberated balloons. I
learned to crawl backwards, collecting grounded toys between the
bends of my knees as I clumsily navigated the doorframes of our
Montreal duplex. On my first birthday, as I sprayed my first birthday
cake in a thin mist of candle-extinguishing saliva, I blinked out over
the white icing from beneath a dense helmet of freshly grown hair.
After only one year in this exhilarating, new world, my fate had been
decided: I would spend the rest of my life fighting a constant battle to
keep people’s hands away from my head.
6. INTROS
Hardly a day went by in Japan when I wasn’t asked
by a curious and wide-eyed Japanese person, “How
many guns do you own?” This was almost never
preceded by the question “Do you own a gun?” Being
from Texas, it was simply assumed that I was an
experienced gunslinger.
8. INTROS
I feel sick. I’m nervous and my stomach’s turning. The room
is lined with neat rows of desks, each one occupied by
another kid my age. We’re all about to take the SATs.
The proctor has instructed us to fill out section four: “race.”
