Eight years is a long time when you are six. It is the difference between a child and a teenager. It is the difference between a crayon drawing and a driver's permit. It is the difference between knowing something in the abstract and knowing it in the body.
I grew up. That was the strange part. I had lived twenty-five years the first time and then I had started over, and the starting over was slow and ordinary in a way that the first version had not been. I went to elementary school and middle school and high school. I learned to ride a bike. I learned to swim. I made friends. I fell in love with a boy in my biology class when I was sixteen and it ended badly and I cried for a week and then I got over it.
My mother married Daniel when I was nine. He taught me how to fish and how to drive
