I knew I had to shift away from my best friend Mark when I felt those tears start up in my eyes at the end of the most beautiful movie I’d ever seen. He sat right next to me, baby-faced and bug-eyed, his braces making him look like he was always in the middle of saying something. I was already embarrassed from when one of the characters, C.W., took his shirt off and I felt my shorts start to get tight. Those two hours I spent with Bonnie and Clyde, my sneakers stuck to the th

The only thing I knew about my great-Aunt Bessie before she passed away while I was in class during my first year of school was that she had her left leg amputated from a bad bout of diabetes, and that she had a trunk that my whole family wanted, especially my grandfather’s side since she was my grandpa’s sister. She lived in a nursing home; I’d heard that at the dinner table, and to hear the family tell it, she had some money, too. I arrived home from school to my mother cry