But not fierce enough.
Not strong enough.
Men with sick heads could always spot a kid like me, alone in the world, not sure how to build a life on their own.
Vulnerable.
Vulnerable kids were valuable in an ugly underworld.
I thanked God those days that I was born male, that I was a little too old to fit certain sick tastes, though my age and sex didn't protect me fully.
It wasn't long before I found myself in a shipping container with a huddled mass of boys and girls my age and younger.
I don't know how long we were in there - days, weeks.
The smell became unbearable, sweat and blood and human waste. Enough to make you sick enough that you could barely choke down the rations offered to us.
The crying got to me, trapped with no way to escape it, calls for their mothers and fathers in more languages than I could count. Calls of hunger, of fear, of pleading.
It drove me half insane, feeling a rage like I had known in my childhood, when the hot summers would make me lash out irrationally, draw blood, crack bones.
I had to force my hands under my ass to keep them from curling into fists, from striking out, from seeking some ever-loving silence.
When I was certain I couldn't take it one more moment, that I would finally snap and go insane, the door was opened, and we were ushered out, looked over, split into groups. The girls were chosen first, fates worse than any I could endure before them.
The older kids, the boys like me, heading into the prime part of adolescence, were sectioned off between bidders, heading to fates of labor of some kind.
I ended up in Colombia in the coca fields, harvesting crops that would feed cocaine habits across more countries than I could count, generating income I would never know.
But, for a change, we were fed.
The cartels knew we worked harder, longer days when they took some care of us.
It was perhaps the first time in my life that I knew the feeling of a full belly.
It was enough to secure loyalty, move me from a picker to a grounds keeper at the Don's house, eventually being allowed to help work as a cover across country lines, confusing the men at checkpoints along with some prostitute hired to look like my mother. One, big, happy family. With a trunk loaded down with cocaine.
Eight trips from Colombia to the Mexican/American border over the years until I turned sixteen.
And that was when a situation, while illegal, and not ideal, but stable and relatively secure, got turned on its ass.
In a hail of bullets, leaving me half-dragging a bleeding woman through the godforsaken Mexican desert without proper food or water, eventually having to leave her - likely to her death - to escape the border patrol who always seemed right on our heels.
It had been late, the night giving me a break from the unyielding sun, burning into my skin, making me sweat through my filthy clothes, my body aching in every inch, but the not-so-distant sounds of men who wanted to grab me and throw me in a detainment center keeping me moving on wobbling legs, choking with lungs made weak from the years in the mines.
And a truck pulled up.
At this point in my life, I should have known better.
I should have known how opportunistic slimeballs could be, how they knew exactly where to troll for victims.
Like the border where families got separated, where little kids were left to try to find safety and new dreams on American soil.
They likely rode the streets most nights, looking for someone alone, vulnerable.
Like me.
Like I had been most of my life.
But all I saw was a truck with air, a full water bottle in the cupholder, a bag of groceries on the floor.
So I climbed in.
I remembered the swing of his arm, but not the pain, not the weapon.
"Woke up in a basement," I went on, taking a steadying breath, searching Lou's face for something I should have known I wouldn't find there.
Disgust.
Pity.
She was simply apt, watching, listening, waiting for the next chapter in my ugly story.
"Do you want to take a break?" she asked at my silence, hand tucking some hair behind my ear, the touch gentle, familiar, a sensation I realized I could get used to. I wanted to get used to.
I wanted a break.
I wanted to stop.
To quit leaking misery all over her.
I was sure she had enough of her own.
I didn't want to give her the burden of mine.
But if I wanted her to give me hers, I had to first give her mine, show her that she could be vulnerable with me because I had been so with her.
It was all about balance.
And I needed to get it out.
For myself.
I guess I never really realized how much poison I had floating around inside. It was time to leech it out.