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first saw these women, she said to herself, “I am more like them than I am like my mother or even Nene.” “I knew I was different as a little kid, but when I saw these counselors I knew I was like them in some fundamental way. I had no words for it. I don’t know whether I defined it as being athletic or what, but I felt an immediate identification with them.”
    But when—aggressive little kid that she was—Karla tried to crawl into their beds, she scared them half to death; they’d respond, at most, with an affectionate wrestle/cuddle before quickly kicking her out. Karla had better luck with her fellow campers. They were in and out of each other’s beds constantly, and Karla was able to expand considerably on her growing knowledge of the female body and sex organs—knowledge she had begun to accrue at home by enticing the neighborhood girls to let her play doctor with her brother’s toy medical kit.
    But her happy summers at camp came to an end when her parents decided the money would be put to better use by enrolling Karla in private school. Her parents put a high value on the education they themselves had never had. After an older boy on the block got stabbed in the back at Walt Whitman Junior High School (where Karla was due to go), Abraham and Rhoda immediately enrolled her instead, as an eighth-grader, in the all-girl “Bromley Institute.” * Bromley was as close to an upper-class finishing school as Brooklyn had to offer, and there were only twenty-eight students in Karla’s class. Always quick to adjust, she took to the school from the start—and not simply because she now found herself in an all-female atmosphere.
    * Wherever names have been changed, quotation marks are used at first reference in order to indicate a pseudonym.

RAY
    R ay was only three when it happened, but he remembers what was playing on the television set in the background (Have Gun, Will Travel) , what his mother was wearing (a strapless turquoise dress) andthe brand of rat poison (JR). She mixed the poison into two glasses of milk, drank one herself, then put the other down in front of him and told him to swallow it. He tried to, but the taste was so bad he stopped after a few sips. His mother got angry; she poured sugar into the glass and again ordered him to drink. When he gagged, she impatiently took the glass out of his hand and drank it down herself. Then she went into the bathroom, came out a few minutes later with her makeup on, started to cry—and then suddenly ran out of the apartment to the neighbors’.
    The next thing Ray remembers is the hospital: orderlies rushing to pump his stomach, his mother vomiting uncontrollably. She lingered for two days and then—aged twenty-two—died. When Ray saw her laid out at the funeral parlor, he figured she was sleeping, and Grandma Viejita told him that that was right. Later, at the cemetery, Viejita tried to throw herself into the open grave and had to be restrained.
    For years afterward, she denied that her daughter had killed herself—until Ray finally confronted her with a truth he had long since accepted: “She killed herself and I know that!” Ray screamed at his grandmother. “I remember the look on her face when she was doing it! I remember everything.…” By then, ten-year-old Ray even had a theory as to why she had tried to take him with her: “Moms knew I would have to suffer a long life, and I would be completely different than anybody else.”
    Viejita took Ray and Sonia, his two-month-old sister, from their apartment in Spanish Harlem to live with her in Jersey City. Ray’s natural father, José Rivera, had disappeared years ago; his mother’s second husband, a drug dealer who had fathered Sonia, showed no interest in the children. José reappeared only once, when Ray was four. Viejita called him into the room one day, pointed to a stranger sitting there, and said,