I didn’t hear my mother come in behind me. Didn’t know she was there until she grabbed my left wrist and yanked me out of my chair so hard my shoulder popped. I told you, she said, and her voice was shaking, but not with anger, with something else. Something that looked like fear, but felt like hatred. I told you what would happen if you kept using this hand.

She dragged me to the kitchen. She turned on the stove, and she held my forearm over the burner until I was screaming so loud the neighbors almost called the police. The scar is still there. A patch of modeled shiny skin on my inner forearm that’s never quite matched the rest of me. When people ask about it, I tell them it was a cooking accident, which I guess isn’t technically a lie.

After that, I learned to write with my right hand in front of them. I learned to eat with my right hand, to wave with my right hand, to do everything with my right hand while they were watching. But when I was alone, I was still me. Still left-handed. Still the daughter they couldn’t fix no matter how hard they tried.

Vanessa knew, of course. She always knew. And she used it like a weapon. She was 2 years younger than me. Blonde, where I was brunette, right-handed where I was wrong. She was everything my parents wanted. And she knew it from the moment she was old enough to understand that I was the family disappointment. She’d catch me writing with my left hand and threaten to tell.