Prelude: The Guided Tour

Let’s get something straight, right off the bat. You’re expecting a story. Fine. I’ll give you a story. But not the one you’ve bookmarked in your head. You know the drill: quirky intro, relatable teen with a sarcastic internal monologue, a slow build to some transformative trauma. Cue the melancholy indie soundtrack.

You can forget the soundtrack.

Grant me this: don’t blink. Don’t scroll. Don’t get comfortable with your favorite beverage and that compassionate, readerly sigh. You want to look at me? At this utterly exposed teenage body, naked in all its imperfect glory, denied even the meager decency of a veil? Then look. Properly. I’ll wait.

Breathe in. Breathe out. See how my shoulders don’t quite square? How my head is tilted just so, not in submission, but in a kind of weary calculation? Good. You’re looking.

Since you’re a student, or you know someone who is, at Mesa Mirage High off West Camelback Mountain Drive in Phoenix, you’ve probably already heard what they did to me. Or you think you have. The rumors have wings, don’t they? They fly through group chats and lunch tables, mutating with each retelling. By now, I’m probably a cautionary tale about attention-seeking, or a punchline about Spirit Week gone wrong, or a tragic figure in a morality play about modesty.

You’re braced for the tearful confession. You expect me to say, “My name is Amara, and everything changed yesterday, in the second week of October...” You want the before and after, neatly segmented. You want the sun-dappled flashback of me laughing, tragically unaware, so the fall feels higher, the tragedy sharper.

Cut to a flashback of me laughing in a sun-dappled cafeteria, tragically unaware.

No. Screw that.

Everything didn’t change. That word is too gentle, too organic. Change is what happens when seasons turn, when you grow out of your favorite jeans. What happened to me wasn’t a change. It was a theft. A violent, public divestment. Everything was ripped. Off me. In front of everyone. The sound wasn’t a poetic tearing; it was a blunt, ugly rip of denim, a sickening snap of elastic, followed by the deafening silence of four hundred held breaths, then the eruption.

So, congratulations. This is where we’re starting. Not in my bedroom with a sappy playlist and a slow pan across tastefully angsty poster art, but here. In the Mesa Mirage Nurse’s Office, perched on that godawful paper-crinkled cot. In nothing. I have been denied the decency of a blanket. Not a sock. Not a thread. Not even a hair tie to strangle a decent thought with.

Just me. The raw, unedited version. My skin. My breath, which I’m apparently supposed to remember how to do. My shaking fingers curled around my knees so tight I’m half-hoping they’ll fuse into a time machine, or at least a decent set of brass knuckles.

Spoiler alert, for those of you still hoping for a twist: They can’t.

And since you’re here, since you’ve paid your metaphorical admission ticket to this particular freak show, we might as well be methodical about it. Consider it a courtesy. A guided tour of the crime scene, where the body is also the witness, the evidence, and the damn crime all rolled into one shivering, seventeen-year-old package.

Let’s start with the foundation. It’s only polite.

The feet. Size nine. High arches, which a podiatrist (back when ‘private medical appointments’ were a thing I could have) called “architectural.” Said I should be a dancer. I tried ballet for six months in fourth grade. Hated the pink, loved the pain. The skin on top is pale, mapped with faint blue highways, veins that trace a delicate, vulnerable roadmap. The soles, though. They’re a history book. Calluses like topographic layers from years of suburban pavement and gym-floor betrayal. They’re survivors. Tough. The phantom memory of socks? A ghost with a surprisingly sharp bite. I can almost feel the cotton, the reinforced heel, the way my big toe always found the seam. A ghost limb, but for fabric.