Growing up in south Florida meant that I knew a lot of weird kids from weird families. 

Florida is a strange place. It’s a melting pot of Hispanic and White and Cuban and Michigan and Ohio and Other. Extremely old and extremely young. Dirt poor and the 1%. All living together in one region but very segregated by class and race. Most of the kids I played with in my neighborhood were within a one or two mile distance from our house and even at age eight or nine my parents thought nothing of letting me roam around, as long as I was home by bedtime and they had some general sense of whose house I was eating dinner in. Most of us were poor but didn’t know it and hadn’t yet had to face what that meant. Occasional run-ins with an alligator or crocodile was a way of life, and it was understood that almost everyone had fruit growing in their backyard that you chose not to eat because you were sick of eating it all your life.

Cori lived across the street from the elementary school I had never attended. It took exactly twenty-six minutes to walk between our houses if we went through the school, which we always did, creeping ourselves out as we chased each other down the long dark open corridors at night. We were in the sixth grade when we met. Something about Cori haunted me; her skin was paler than mine and she was thinner than I was, which was nearly impossible. She was the first friend I knew to have a full raging bush of dark pubic hair but had not yet developed breasts and she had no problem walking around nude through her house when her mother and grandmother and brother were home. 

Cori’s older brother was named Matthew, which disturbed me because their last name was Matthews. Matthew Matthews. What was wrong with their parents?

A lot.

I only ate dinner at her house once and I only spent the night once, both in the same evening, because I was so traumatized by what occurred there.

Although I came from a household where I had never once had to cook anything for myself and where my mother was always awaiting my arrival home from school with a healthy snack and a smile, I had become accustomed to the fact that many of my friends didn’t have mothers who prepared food for them regularly. I took a secret joy in those non-dinners, those unhealthy snacks. Toast with jam and marshmallow fluff out of a jar for dinner, Capri Sun to drink? Fuck yeah, I would have thought to myself, if I knew the word ‘fuck’ back in 1989.

But Cori’s mother cooked. And it was terrifying. By cooked, I mean I suspected what we were being served was classified as some kind of meat in a third-world nation or in some canning factory in Nebraska somewhere but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I was a vegetarian, something my family acknowledged and a fact that other families seemed amused by. Something Cori’s mother was incensed by. And Cori had a way of acting out when I was around for the sake of making me laugh.

“EAT IT!” 

Cori planted her elbows firmly on the table. “No.”

“Corinne you eat that goddamned plate of food right NOW you hear me.”

Cori looked at me and grinned. We smacked each other’s thighs under the table, something we did every morning in homeroom at our middle school. 

After about five minutes of Cori refusing to eat, her mother turned her gaze to me. “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t your mom teach you that it’s rude to not eat your dinner?”

“I don’t eat meat,” I whispered.

“We eat meat in this house, we eat meat because it makes us healthy, we eat our dinner because I didn’t pay for this food just so you spoiled brat kids can sit here and refuse to eat it now eat your food or I’m calling your mother and let you fight with her about it.”

My ears perked up. This would be some good drama, a fight about food over the phone with my mother. A phone food fight. I knew it wouldn’t be with me.

I stared at the ring of jelly surrounding one edge of my mystery beef, cold canned peas beside it. I imagined my grandmother, prim and proper with a sharp tongue and dry wit, and what she would say if she were looking down at this mess of food. “Why, I wouldn’t even give that to the damn dog as punishment if he had just fouled on the rug,” she’d say. Suddenly I started to laugh.

“That’s it. What’s your number? I’m calling your mother.”

I dialed the phone for her and then Cori and I ran to her room and locked the door. I could hear Cori’s dad come in the front door, an argument, and then silence. We waited and read 16 magazine, cutting out pictures of Patrick Swayze and Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. When we thought it was safe, we crept out into the living room and sat down to watch Jeopardy with Cori’s father, who was drinking beer from a can and talking to the television, and Cori’s brother, who I never heard speak once despite the fact that I had spent many afternoons at her house prior to this night.

At some point when 20/20 came on, Cori fell asleep and her brother got up and left the room. Hoping to bore myself enough to feel sleepy, I curled up on the far end of the couch and started watching the special on e.coli disease that was killing small children in Minnesota or some such place. Suddenly I felt an awkward moment, an awareness of the fact that Cori’s father was running his hand up and down her thigh and was snapping the band of her underwear, letting his fingers run across the line of her scrawny hip bones. He was staring at me. Cori didn’t move. It was years before I would have the thought that maybe she wasn’t asleep; that maybe this was how she dealt with such horrors of living in her house, the embarrassment of having a friend see her home life. I won’t ever know.

He reached his hand across the couch and I felt it connect with the back of my neck. What he said was barely audible over the blaring television but I heard it clearly enough.

“Let me see your little panties, sugar. What you got under there? I want to see.” His hand brushed down from my neck to my shoulder as he winked at me.

“I have to pee,” I whispered, frozen. It was the only way I knew how to get out of this besides screaming. Those were the only two options that came to my little eleven year old brain. Pee or scream. I grabbed Cori’s hand and pulled her, protesting and groggy, from the couch, hearing her father mutter something under his breath as I dragged Cori back to her room and locked her door.

I didn’t sleep that night, thinking about Cori’s family. Thinking about the father I had and the men I knew and how they wanted to protect me, something I had always taken for granted. Thinking maybe there was something I could do to protect Cori. But I never went over to her house again. And my mother thought it was because of the sludge I was served for dinner, but I knew the real reasons why. I don’t know what happened to her, but after that semester I transferred to a different school and I took the long way around the neighborhood to always avoid that house.

Cori held secrets so visible I could see them through her translucent skin. I hope someone else saw them in time to save her.