("One Through Six" can be read here. "Seven Through Eight" here. "Nine" here. And "Ten" here.)
1993, age eleven
Over spring break, we fly out to California to visit my dad, and even though we're not hungry he immediately takes us to IHOP from the airport. It's there he tells us my step-mom is six-months pregnant with our little brother or sister. It dawns on me, perhaps not right away but eventually, that she was pregnant the first time we met her—three months before—and we had no idea.
Over Memorial weekend my brother, Adam, is born. This same weekend, during a trip to Tulsa to visit my grandpa, grandma and uncles, I am involved in a freak, random accident. My uncle accidentally hits me in the eye with a baseball bat, in a batting cage at a putt-putt place. I spend a week in the hospital and undergo surgery to rebuild my eye socket. To this day, there is no visible scar, and that's the third miracle of the situation. The first: I didn't lose my eye. The second: I didn't lose my vision. I will always have a few plastic plates in place of my eye socket, and I usually lead with this at parties.
When I'm well enough to travel, I fly out to California for the rest of the summer, and I hold my baby brother for the first time in the San Francisco airport. I spend the summer days with my step-mom, sister and brother, watching "Loving" and eating Otter Pops. I'm terrified of starting middle school in the fall, and one day as I walk with my dad down the streets of San Francisco, I begin to cry because I'm not sure how to use a locker. He listens and tells me these things work themselves out.
Sometime over the summer, back in Texas, my mom moves us into the house I will live in until the day I pack up everything I own and move to college, the house my mother still lives in.
I start middle school (sixth grade), and I somehow learn to use my locker. I have horrible hair this year, but I just can't figure out how to curl it or maintain it, so I wear a lot of headbands. I ride the bus home from school everyday. One day, about a week after school starts, I reach the bus late and find all the empty seats are taken. I ask a girl who I am sure is a seventh grader if I can sit next to her. She smiles and says yes. It turns out she's actually my age and her name is Natalie and she doesn't know a soul at this school either. We become inseparable and I spend so much time sitting at her kitchen counter, her parents joke about charging me rent.
Fourteen years later, she will stand beside me on my wedding day. A year after that—this May, actually—I will stand beside her at her own.