Memory that May or May Not Be True, #2

I was in high school and my friends who were interested in photography often used me in their photographs. One girl took me to a meadow and bound and gagged me after dressing me in a schoolgirl uniform.

Another, who had tried heroin when she was in fifth grade, and later got into meth, and loved Diane Arbus, and had the same birthday as I did, brought a few girls and me to a waterfall, where she had us get topless and press our bodies against the rocks; and I was not comfortable with my body then, but I felt beautiful, cervine, a drop of golden sun.

I went to the mall with this same girl in our sophomore year and she said, "Look, my mom is dying. She's going to die in a few months." Her mom was a Christian Scientist. She hadn't told anyone else. I remember the wake only vaguely. I remember her mother only as the person who drove us from place to place as preteens.

I had never been to a wake before. I didn't know what to do with my body. I never cried; it was like any other party, maybe quieter. I probably ate.