4
Tammy
My father hit me last night. Though my cheek barely showed it. I supposed that the skin had toughened up over the years.
But Yumi still noticed, despite sitting two desks away in our fourth-grade science class.
She slid a note over. What happened to your face?
I was stupid and tripped, I wrote back.
This was the second secret that I kept from Yumi. The first was that I didn’t go to church.
When I was six, my parents had sat me down and said, ‘One day, you will die. Do you know what that means?’
I shook my head. I honestly didn’t know, but I hoped that I would be reincarnated as a cheetah.
‘You go straight into the ground. The worms will feed on you,’ said my mom.
‘It’s the natural order of things,’ said my dad.
I asked them about Heaven.
My mom said, ‘We can’t believe
