We’d been walking opposite paths when we first met. She knew there were people like me in her world; I never thought there could be anyone like her in mine. Dolly must have known what I’d been doing in that slaughterhouse—my skin color alone would have told her that much. She probably thought she knew why I was there, too, but she would have been wrong. I would have told her the truth—I wanted to tell her everything—but I didn’t know how. After a while, I decided Dolly must have been some kind of dream—the kind people say you have when you come close to death. The tremors that keep coming, even after the earthquake has passed. If I’d had a childhood, it had been wiped from my mind before I woke up in that hospital so many years ago. I’d run away from that hospital without knowing why, or even whatever I thought I’d been looking for. An old man found me while I was rooting in garbage bins every night just to stay alive—it was the best of the few choices a street boy like me had.
