My dad's Aunt Katie was very superstitious. He has pictures of himself little dressed up in girls' clothing. I always thought they were hand-me-downs, but the more I read the more I was convinced she dressed him that way so the fairies wouldn't take him. Sometimes I thought that they did, and that this person who was supposed to be him was a replacement and that was why he slept so much and had so many stories. I didn't know enough to know if there was a mark that would tell me if it was really him, but I counted the moles on his back almost every day.
I asked my dad "How do you know you're still alive?"
"I don't," he said.
"Hmm..." I said, not sure what question to ask next.

My friend Patty had a port-wine stain across her armpit, a birthmark that showed just a little until she took off her shirt and showed it to me.
"Some people have them across their face," she said, "mine's almost a secret."
Some people said it was a mark of evil the day we mixed up perfume, hand lotion, pee and I'm not sure what else with a popsicle stick. We had the mixture in a dirt hole dug in her back yard to make motion potion- so we could go really fast or really slow, depending on who we had to spy on, and what secrets we wanted to discover.
We ended up in the hospital getting our stomachs pumped.
Afterward, both of our mothers bought us dresses, which they said was to help with forgetting the pain of it all. I thought it was to keep us from ever trying anything like that again. You probably wouldn't try such things in a dress. That's why my dad's aunt thought he would be safe in one.
How could we explain that we thought the hole led to the fairies, and if we could find one and not look away (like they always tried to trick you into doing), we could move at any speed we wanted to for the rest of our lives.

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