Aspera.
It comes to me on my knees in the back of one of the mall’s storerooms, its gray concrete walls dappled with early morning light. I close my eyes and there’s a memory there: I was thirteen years old and I’d gone missing just a little while. Ended up on a dirt road outside of town. It was summer then too, the kind of heat that sours you, and I was angry with my mother, the kind of anger that changes the way you look at the world and makes you understand, for better and worse, the way the world’s looking at you. I remember my body as it was then, caught between fading adolescence and aspiring womanhood. I didn’t yet fully grasp my burgeoning chest or bee-stung lips turned suddenly suggestive. I was dizzy, dried out from the weather, and I wasn’t sure how far I’d walked when the car pulled up beside me, its window rolled down.
A man inside.
Are you the girl? he’d asked.
And I’d felt like I’d been saved from something, but I didn’t know what.
Until now.
Now: I open my eyes, letting my gaze drift from the man standing over me, to the transom window in the corner, to the view outside. I know the mountains are that way.
Aspera is too.
A revelation.
“We doing this or what?” he breathes.
“I want to see the pictures again,” I say.
He makes a noise, his face red and strained with his unattended hard-on, but he gives them to me. I hold the glossies in my trembling hands, a young white girl stretched across the top photo’s length. I take in her long, perfect legs reaching for the smooth plane of her perfect stomach, extending toward the soft swell of her perfect breasts. Her perfect blond curls spill over her shoulders, haloing the peaches-and-cream complexion of her perfect face. Her pretty little lips form a perfect pink o.
Oh: the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.
It’s me. I’m the girl.