Thirteen years old, wandering the stalls of the county fair in a pack of four other girls in the slanted evening light of late summer. Rows and rows of pigs and horses, sheep and goats, all eager for us to reach our hands into their pens and stroke their heads, their soft and twitching ears. The walkways lined with food carts and white tents with many delicacies, like small tubes of honey sold for a dime, the nectar tinged pinkish gold and sweeter than anything. We wore shorts and t-shirts, our bare skin gleaming in the heat. We shared lip gloss with one another, trading flavors of mint and candy and cherry so our mouths always looked shiny and pink. I don’t need to tell you we were beautiful. I don’t need to tell you we were too young to understand the danger of that beauty, except the one girl who knew about men after the hands of her stepfather searched her body under the covers one night before slipping out of the room like a ghost and left her bruised and crying and afraid. She didn’t tell the rest of us for years. Dusk came on and lights from the carnival rides started spinning and flashing like sirens. We were eager to try the octopus, with its spinning limbs and whirling booths. We all piled into one booth, our hip bones pressing into each other’s thighs. The ride began and we were giddy—no other word for it. We spun and spun, gripping the handrail and shrieking with delight. How long did it take us to realize something was wrong? The ride would slow sometimes to let the passengers of other booths off, but it was never our turn. Please, we called out to the operator. Please let us off. He began to laugh. His long hair hung down his back in a thin brown braid, and his face was smattered in sunspots. Princesses, he said, my little princesses. The ride went faster and we lifted our hands to our mouths, desperate not to puke on ourselves, or each other. This went on for a long while. Finally, everything slowed and stopped and we staggered away, too sick to mouth off to the operator or too afraid of his hatred. We stumbled to a nearby patch of grass and fell to our knees, praying for the earth to stop swirling. We lay on our backs and stared at the dark blue sky, at the few glinting stars and the waning moon. We could hear a woman’s voice singing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from a stage somewhere nearby, and the roar of the crowd in the rodeo stadium watching the violent bucking of the bulls, plumes of dust rising from their hooves. We understood something about cruelty that night, about the lengths a stranger would go to harm us. We held hands in the grass while one or two of us cried quietly. The girl with the stepfather tried to soothe us, saying shh, shh, it’s okay. She knew it would only get worse for all of us. She knew this was just the beginning.