Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

lind man’s bluff and sing B-I-N-G-O. For a moment
I forget that I’m not normal. When Pete darts inside
the house, my aunt grabs her son, nudges him
toward me, prods him to ask, “You wanna play, too?”
I can hear voices chanting a familiar rhyme in the
front yard. I slide from behind the chair, follow Pete
through the door.
Outside CeeCee and Betty exchange looks. Pete
mutters, “My mom made me ask her.” The way he
says “her” sets me apart, makes it okay for the
cousins to trip me during a game of tag. I play
anyway. I’ll show them I’m not a baby. They know I
won’t complain: they wallop my skinny chest with
interlocked arms when we play red rover out on the
asphalt streets of their subdivision, or snatch an ice
cream bar out of my hand.
What they don’t know is how sharp I am inside. I
can stand there without tears, watch one of them lick
my Creamsicle down to the clean wooden stick, and
not say a word. I can stand there because inside I am
slashing them to ribbons.
“Say you’re ugly,” Pete demands, holding my ice
cream above CeeCee’s wide-open mouth. “Say you
look like an old brown piece of dog turd.”