When I first thought about this part of the story, I thought about the house where I grew up. The truck in the driveway, the changing rules, everybody watching my stepfather's mood. What I didn't think about, until I started writing, was how long it kept going after I was no longer a little kid. A lot of what happened in that house never made it into the book, and some of it never will. But I want you to understand something the book only partly shows: the abuse wasn't only physical, it was mental too, for both of us boys, and only one of those two ever stopped.

My brother and I both got whoopings with belts. The belt would come off, and we knew what was coming. My younger sister got less of it. She was his baby girl. I always felt I got the worst of it because I was the stepchild and wasn't his blood, though I can't tell you what was in his mind. I only know my mother saw the difference, my grandmother saw it, and I felt it.

As I got older, the abuse changed shape. The threat of it turning physical never fully left, but more of it came through words. He had no problem telling me, "Fuck you. You no-good son of a bitch. You're never going to be anything." Worthless and disappointment were words I heard often enough that they stopped being surprising. When I was small I disappeared into Legos, sitting on the floor for hours, building something, taking it apart, starting over. It kept me quiet and out of the way, which was how I kept things from getting worse. As a teenager I started defending myself, and sometimes that turned physical between us. Eventually I got stronger than he was. That didn't settle anything. It just gave him something else to be angry about.