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press this right here,” he said, pointing to the hand brakes that controlled my back tires. “You got it?”
    I didn’t hear much of what he said because I was lost in his tooth. The artistry of it, that is. I wondered how the dentist had cut the gold to fashion the shape of a star, an ode to the Dallas Cowboys, whose plays and wins and losses were discussed like philosophy, Chad being Aristotle to Dad’s Plato.
    I shook my head.
    “What?” he asked, stunned by my refusal. “You just saw your brother do it. It ain’t that hard.”
    “I’m not scared or anything like that,” I lied. “I just think I will fall.”
    “You think I’d put you in danger?” he asked. I wondered if this was a trick question. It had been only a few months since I’d moved from Hawaii, and already I had been forced to swim, throw a spiral football, share a house with strangers, and now ride this bike that I hadn’t even asked for.
    “Boy, answer my question,” he continued. “Do you think I’d put you in danger?”
    I shook my head.
    “Well, stop being a sissy and get your ass down that hill!” he said as Chad rolled his bike up to where we stood. I could see the excitement drain from his face as he traced Dad’s speech. I hated that I took the fun out of things for him. I often imagine what Chad’s childhood would have been like if our parents had kept us separated. He probably would have had a ball: baseball, basketball, dodgeball, and the holy grail of football. I can see Chad and Dad being heckled by Raiders fans when the Cowboys came to town; Dad studying Chad’s form as they played catch; and Dad teaching Chad flamboyant ways to triumphantly slam a domino. Instead, Chad dealt with reality: his older sibling breaking down during an afternoon bicycle ride because he was such a sissy.
    Sissy became one of the first epithets thrown at me with regularity. My father would say “Stop being a sissy” with the same ease as he’d say “I love you, baby!” Sissy  ’s presence in my life helped numb me early on to harsher words that would soon be hurled at my body, from freak and faggot to nigger and tranny . When I was younger, I would protect myself by rebutting with the playground mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” As my adoration for words deepened in adolescence, I grew to feel that mantra was a well-meaning lie, a pacifier meant to temporarily soothe the hurt and pain of such violent words. I now know that epithets say more about the user than the target, and I believe Maya Angelou, who says that “words are things” and that “someday we’ll be able to measure the power of words.” Words have the power to encourage and inspire but also to demean and dehumanize. I know now that epithets are meant to shame us into not being ourselves, to encourage us to perform lies and to be silent about our truths.
    To my father, I was a sissy, and he tried his hardest to squash my femininity the only ways he knew how: intimidation and fear. He seemed to believe that if Chad enjoyed the bike ride, then I should also enjoy it. Chad was held as the standard of acceptable boy behavior; I grew aware of the fact that I negated that standard, and I internalized that on a deep level. I thought that something must be wrong with me because I didn’t enjoy the things Chad did, the activities that Chad took on with such ease and little debate. The constant friction between my father and me led me to not like him. I would focus on the loudness of his voice, the aggressiveness of his actions, the argumentative nature of our conversations. As he compared me to Chad, I found myself comparing him to my mother, whose gentle, calm presence was in sharp contrast to his. The crux of our conflict lay in the fact that we each couldn’t be who we wanted the other to be.
    “If you don’t go down that hill, I swear I’ll buzz your hair when we get home,” Dad said.
    That threat, one Dad often wielded