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One day, knowing a big black girl wants to beat me up, I skip a seventh-grade class. Instead, I walk to a local convenience store to buy a Coke and waste time till my next class. I hang out aimlessly on the cement curb out front as the hot Florida sun beats down on my head. A carload of Cuban men approaches me, gang members who threaten to throw me into their car and rape me. In a split-second decision, I break the cool Coke bottle against the curb, point it at the closest man, and shout defiantly, using my toughest street voice: “Fuck you! Go ahead! You may be able to take me, but I swear, I’ll kill one of you.” Screaming at the top of my lungs I scan the area and hope to bring attention to myself.

The gang members sneer.

“So which one will it be?” I continue. “Which one of you is going to die? You?” I lunge my jagged weapon forward. The leader stops, lifts his brow thinking, and nervously backs away from the sharp point of my bottle and the wild fury of my voice.

The four men fumble into their car, hissing poisonous threats of revenge. “You wait, little gringa,” they scream, anger raging in their eyes. “We come back! You not gonna be so tough all the time!” But the ploy works, and not turning their backs, they burn a trail of rubber behind them. I am almost thirteen and have now gained the reputation of a “fighting crazy.” They are right. I calculated the situation correctly. Sheer terror and panic bring out a side of me that holds no punches when being backed into a corner. To the death—a tough title to hold, but to me, it’s one way to get some desperately needed reprieve. Little do I know I am learning the life skills to do just that in the short years to come—save my life.

Heavy-duty thieves find our house an easy target, and Mom is also forced into dangerous confrontations. After a double shift at work, Mom drags home from her waitress job and accidentally walks in on the toughest criminal of the neighborhood. “Cleveland” is a dangerous, nineteen-year-old black boy, with scars so thick along his head, his hair no longer grows on most of his skull. He is well-known as mean and deadly for starting fights with baseball bats at neighborhood parks, and there he is in our kitchen, raiding our refrigerator.

“Vhaaat is dis?” Mom screams with all her five feet one German might, furious with the intruder. “You get out of my house, you son of a bitch! You take food from my childrrrren! You, you, I call da poliiiice! Get out!” She backs the now-frightened thug out of our house, pointing her finger and threatening to kill him if she ever sees him near her family again. Neighbors crawl out of the woodwork like gnats to a streetlight to watch, gaping, as the woman in the white shirt and black waitress skirt backs the toughest guy in the neighborhood out of her house with only her finger. It isn’t hard for anyone to see who I imitate.

Mom, Terry, Wayne, and I get tougher and tougher in our attitudes, and Grandma grows more and more weary. She is very elderly now. As the built-in babysitter while Mom works her many jobs, it’s tiring for her to deal with us children and our rebellion at the growing hostility of our neighborhood. Mom not only takes her rage out on us children, but on Grandma too. As far as I know, she only threatens to hit her, never really making contact with her fists.

We lose Grandma to pneumonia in January of 1976, just a few months before Dad makes it back. She has waited loyally for him to return—almost seven years. I watch her as she rocks in that same rocking chair from New Jersey, Bible in hand, crying daily until the end. What a horrible feeling it gives me to watch her wither away, sad and abandoned, disappointed by the one she loves the most.

Some weeks before her death, near Christmastime, I have a succession of terrifying dreams that Grandma will leave us: three dreams in a row that frighten me down to my bones. I become hysterical. Mom tells me everything’s all right, but I know better. I pay attention to my dreams anyway, and those last weeks that Grandma is alive I am extra nice, offering to help her do her chores and cook the meals. I do kind things again for her and share happy thoughts about Aunt Ella and the snow in New Jersey, like it was before we got here, before the hardness. I remember sitting out on the backyard patio, she in a green and white lawn chair, my head in her lap. She strokes my long sun-kissed hair with her bony, wrinkled hand and I tell her I love her, hoping she loves me back.

“Grandma,” I ask, “am I a good girl?”

“Yes,” she replies, “you are a good girl, Dawn. You are a good girl,” and she pats my head softly. I am taking in every ounce of her that I can—her touch, her smell, her look, not wanting the moment to end. She smells of faint lavender and mold from the hand-rinsed Ace bandage I help her wrap around her varicose-veined leg. I wish she wasn’t so tired anymore and that I had been nicer to her in the past. I want her to be happy. She deserves to be happy.

On the third day, after her death, I see her one last time. She walks through the house floating in a cloud of pink. At first, I think it’s my sister wearing her favorite pink pajamas. But when I hear Terry’s voice at the other end of the house, I know it can’t be her. Grandma’s hair is a fuzzy gray, and a warm glow surrounds her. Her presence seems soft as she passes by my side and glides toward the back bedrooms. I jump up to follow her through the house, desperately willing her to stay, as the delicate pink figure disappears at the end of the hallway. Grandma’s gray hair and pink outline slowly dim to nothing and I stand in amazement, staring at the blank brown paneling, feeling only the sense that she has come to say good-bye and that she knows she is loved.

With Grandma gone, there is less money for the household bills, and Mom is under much more stress to make ends meet. I am the oldest. Mom reminds me of this constantly, especially during her rages. I need to help the family, help my brother and sister. It is my responsibility. I think I have found the perfect solution: a job through a work program at school allows me to work half days and get credits at the same time. This means money for Mom and the house and less time at a school I dread.

I am proud the day I land a cashier job at a Burger King a few blocks away. I love wearing the orange and yellow polyester bellbottoms and puffy patch cap. I get a free Whopper meal each day and memorize the “Have It Your Way” rules at the back table, right where Grandma used to take us out to eat for a hamburger on her Social Security payday. Mom will be happier now. Not worry so much, I tell myself. But that doesn’t happen.

She dislocates my jaw on a morning that I am late for work. It is a few days after my first paycheck. I have given her money for food and the house and bought her a gold necklace as a belated birthday present. Three charms hang from a real 14 karat chain, silhouettes of the profile of two girls and a boy. On each of them is engraved “Dawn,” “Terry,” and “Wayne.” The morning she attacks me, I try to rip the necklace off her neck, but she protects it as she throws wild punches with her strong right fist. I scramble off the utility room floor and out the back door, limping and crying the four blocks to work.

My uniform, my pride and joy, is torn at my chest. I am bruised, swollen, and hysterical as my day-shift manager tries to console me. I tell him it is my mother; she does this all the time. I thought she wouldn’t be this way if I was working and helping with the bills. I thought she would stop. It is always the money that makes her so angry, or that’s what I believe. But Mom still needs to let me know that she is boss, and now I know that I will never make her happy, that she will not love me more even if I’m working and trying to help her out. I give up. My manager offers to help and find me a safe place to stay, but I am too embarrassed.

Eventually I lose my job. I stop showing up. I stop showing up for school too. Instead, I hang around with the outcasts of my neighborhood. They are my new family now. I stay at various friends’ houses for days and sometimes don’t even call home to tell Mom where I am. On the streets at night, I listen to heavy metal, get high, and hate life.