Love was like a distant Island, or an oasis that offered its cool, life-giving water to others, but rarely to me. I became like a desert creature, growing a thick skin and an array of poisonous barbs to insure my survival. In my freshman year of high school, I became the fat girl, living on sugar, and fast food, and spite. My mother sent me off to boot camp to redeem myself, but not before taking some very unflattering pictures of me in a bikini, pictures that she still shows people to this day. It was there I learned to run, and shoot, and drink, and lie. Many of the other girls were there to avoid going to Juvi. Late at night we would sit up in the bunkhouse, playing truth or dare, or strip poker, smoking cigarettes and drinking whatever alcohol one of the older girls could buy from the kitchen boys with blow jobs and what little money came from home.

Helen was sixteen, fearless, and beautiful. Her hazel eyes missed nothing. We ran together every morning. She took me under her wing, protecting me from the cruelty of the other girls. By the end of the summer, I had dropped fifty pounds, and picked up some of her confidence. She was so glamorous! She taught me about boys, and how to use eyeliner, and how to kiss. She had a thirty-year-old, coke dealing, boyfriend back home who drove fast cars, and owned racehorses for kicks. She told me, with a far away look in her eye, about the night he snuck her into the stables and had her ride bareback on his most valuable steed, wearing nothing but a necklace of stolen emeralds and diamonds from Brazil. I can still imagine her, with her porcelain Irish skin, and red hair glowing in the moonlight. I didn’t know what to do with my feelings for her then, so I buried them away under my growing tough-girl, snow queen exterior, and forgot about them. I think part of my reason for becoming a cop came when I discovered, several years later, that she had been beaten to death by her boyfriend in a fit of coked-up rage, her body dumped in a nearby swamp. A fact my mother casually dropped at the dinner table one night, watching me closely as I schooled my reaction.