My sister and I spent summer weekdays with a dozen other kids at a woman’s house in Upstate New York until the moment I witnessed the woman’s husband launch a rat snake into the sky with his homemade catapult — the shiny black serpent’s white belly glinting in the sunlight as it soared higher and higher before disappearing into the branches of a tree — and murmured “Fuck me,” a little too loudly.

We were henceforth shuttled to the home of my Taekwondo instructor and his wife where no one seemed to mind nine year olds speaking like two-bit Staten…

When I was a high school freshman, someone called my house’s landline at 2am on a Saturday morning. The ringing in my parents’ room woke me, and my stomach instantly dropped. I thought my grandmother was dead.

I could hear my mother moving quickly down the hall to my bedroom. She knocked curtly before entering and savagely flipping on the light. Clutching the cordless phone to her chest, she whisper-shouted: “There’s a young woman asking for you! I think she’s in trouble!”

At one of her NOW meetings, my mother had underwent past-life regression therapy and learned she’d once been…

One hot, humid and downright disgusting week into my first semester of college, and I was already hobbled by injury. I sat outside the Forum (student union) with my leg propped up, icing my knee.

“Jesus, your knee! It’s so swollen,” a Southern voice drawled.

I looked up from nursing my pre-patella bursitis and watched a barefoot girl in a sundress slide into the patio chair next to mine. She set her Big Cookie — a Forum Grill speciality — on her lap and snapped open a peach iced tea.

“What happened to it?”

I told her I’d hurt it…

You’re hoping to log ten miles of running toward your ultramarathon training, but you and your sister only make it five in the 100-degree heat before it’s clear that it’d be dangerous to continue. It’s late May 2014, at the height of #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen, in Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park.

Back at the campsite, you both begin drinking from your cooler full of beer. There is no cell phone reception out here. Your sister forgot to bring a book but she’s one of those people who, when there’s nothing to do, is able to fall into a deep…

My sister and I were at LAX trying to check our luggage when the Delta agent claimed that my sister had never checked in and that it was too late for her to do so — she’d have to pay for a later flight to JFK. We disputed the claim but, you know, the house always wins.

As I sat in my assigned seat, I heard my sister’s name called over the PA system several times. I informed a flight attendant of the situation, and he said she was definitely checked in for the flight. By then, of course, it…