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shittiest job.
    So we'll cut him some slack for being one grim ass motherfucker. But we won’t cut him slack for what happened next. What happened next was, he pointed to the stuffed horse I was holding and said, “Show me on the horse where Gretchen touched you.”
    I looked at him, then at the adorable, fluffy stuffed horse. Then back at him again.
    I was five, but even then I understood when someone was being a dumb ass. At that point, even though this was well before the show Punk'd —and even if it has existed, I wouldn't have been allowed to watch it, because MTV was ‘too mature’ for me at my age (go ahead and laugh it up, you lovers of irony)—I was pretty sure I was being Punk’d by Officer Moustachio at that moment. So I looked around and, sure enough, there was a video camera mounted to the wall.
    "Is that on?" I pointed to it, asking him—quite politely, I might add—if I was being videotaped against my knowledge. I don't know why, but for some reason that struck me as creepy, even after everything that had happened.
    "No," he told me, with a straight face. In spite of the fact that there was a motherfucking blinking red light on the thing, which even a scared, idiot child would know means that the camera is fucking on .
    In that moment, Officer Moustachio lost what little trust he'd gained from me with his official looking uniform and totally badass nose ferret.
    After lying point blank to my face, he repeated the question about the horse.
    "Show me where the babysitter touched you."
    But even if I hadn't just been betrayed by yet another grown up in my life, even if I'd trusted him enough to talk, I think deep down what my little mind was really rebelling at was the thought of violating that innocent, fuzzy little stuffed horse in the exact same way Gretchen had violated me.
    And no matter how much I wanted to be free of her, I couldn't be like her. Not ever.
    A couple of days later, child services gave me back to my mom. Just like that.
    "Sorry we took your kid, lady. We tried to make her sing like a canary, but she stonewalled us, so...I'm sure everything's fine here. Enjoy the rest of her shattered childhood. Don't forget to tip your babysitter." Waka waka .
    Oh, I'm sorry. Does my glib tone offend you? Do you think I'm being disrespectful, joking about my fucked-up life? Well that's just too goddamned bad. I've earned the right to laugh about this, if I feel like it. I fucking lived it. Just because I usually don't feel like laughing doesn't mean I don't have the right to.
    And God, I wish so hard that I could laugh about this next part. And I wish even harder that it wasn't true. That I'd made it up, just like people will probably say I made up the rest of this story.
    But it is true, and I'll never be able to forget what my mom said to me that day, about an hour after I got home from child services:
    "I hope you're happy, Natasha. Now we have to move."
    So we did. Across town. To another school district, another trailer park.
    This one was called Lazy Acres. (I'm telling you, you cannot make this shit up.)
    Luckily for me, no one in LA—the abbreviated trailer park, not the city, obviously—had a relative or anything in BE.
    Not so luckily for me, I was now so fantastically broken that it didn't matter.
    Everywhere I went, it seemed like people knew. Everyone I met seemed like they were blaming me for something I didn't even know I'd done. Worst of all, I'd become like a homing beacon for other people who were broken. People like Gretchen.
    By the time I graduated middle school, it had happened three more times. Once with a boy named Christopher down the street, a few weeks after I moved in. Once with the father of a little girl I babysat for—again, irony is a son of a bitch—when I was twelve. His name was Doug.
    It even happened with a stranger; a guy who was literally just driving by my house one day. I was playing in the sprinklers in front of our little blue double-wide, and he stopped