Chapter 1 — Sixteen Years of Hiding

My daughter, Maya, was born with large, vivid birthmarks covering much of her body.

For sixteen years, they had been the central fact of her life, though not because of anything about the marks themselves, which were simply a part of her, but because of how the world responded to them.

Other children stared.

They whispered.

Some of them, over the years, laughed.

And a child learns, faster than any adult would like to believe, exactly how to make herself smaller in response to that kind of attention, how to fold and hide and disappear.

So Maya hid.

Even during the hottest summers, she wore long sleeves and long pants, sweating rather than showing an inch of skin.

She avoided swimming pools entirely.

She refused to change in front of the other girls in locker rooms, waiting until they were gone, or finding an empty stall.

And she developed a particular, practiced skill that broke my heart every time I watched her deploy it: she could step out of any photograph that threatened to show too much of her, sliding to the edge of the frame and then out of it entirely, or turning at the last second so that only her covered parts faced the camera.

For sixteen years, I watched my beautiful daughter treat her own body as something to be managed, concealed, apologized for, and I did everything a mother can do, which is to love her fiercely and tell her the truth about how beautiful she was and wait, patiently, achingly, for the day she might believe it herself.

I did not know, when we packed for Florida that spring, that the day was about to come.

Or that someone would try to take it from her.

I should say what those sixteen years were like, from a mother’s side of them, because it is a particular kind of ache that I think only the parents of children the world is unkind to fully understand.

When your child is hurt by the world, in the ordinary ways children are hurt, by a scraped knee or a lost game or a friend who moves away, you can help.

You can bandage it, or comfort it, or fix it.