The Monster Inside Kept Me

I have dissociative amnesia.

Whenever the emotional shock is violent enough to snap my nervous system, my mind simply drops into an abyss. A hard, instantaneous blackout.

When I was ten, three neighborhood punks cornered me in an alley behind the middle school. When I finally came to, I was sitting on a cold wooden bench at the local police precinct. The three boys were huddled behind a broad-shouldered detective, sobbing hysterically, begging him to protect them from me.

When I was thirteen, my homeroom teacher secretly handed my spot in the state academic decathlon to the school board…