And I wished myself back—back to the future or wherever home was supposed to be—clicking my heels together in a frantic ticking heart staccato like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Because the South can be a dangerous place, especially for those who don’t understand it.

I think of Ariel, my local neighborhood mermaid, how she only had twenty-four hours to turn her life around...

My Stephen King for his Ayn Rand. My Terry Goodkind for his T.S. Elliot. Not a bang but a whimper.

She dreamed of driving off bridges: into a lake beneath some twisting highway of her youth, into the reservoir on the country road to home, into the San Francisco Bay.

Her mother always told her, “If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.

Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...

Mrs. Porter was from Virginia and had a smooth-as-cat-fur way of speaking. She taught me how to say, “Fiddle-Dee-Dee,” just like Scarlett O’Hara and she made her split-pea soup with bacon and even let me try on her lipstick sometimes as she teased up my hair in the same sixties style she wore, “Ala Pricilla Presley,” whoever that was.

Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, “Lesbians are women who like to have sex with other women,” which I didn’t think was all that weird.