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scolding. It seemed irrational to her. Regina’s grandmother, Dorothy Rhoden, was harsh and stern.
    Regina’s mother, Toni Hartwell, was the same, and they were equally strict on Regina. In hot, humid Texas, in a community close to the Gulf coast, little Regina wasn’t allowed to play outside in bare feet. If she did, she was disciplined. She wasn’t allowed to wear pants or shorts. Toni wanted her beautiful daughter with daddy’s cheekbones to be in a dress.
    But the child Regina Hartwell was not one to be regulated. She screamed and yelled at her parents. She cursed at them, seeming to rarely ever hold anything back. She had a strong personality and fight-for-survival traits that would later be both her virtue and her death.
     
     
    Regina Hartwell had had that wider-than-the-nearby-Pasadena-Freeway rebellious streak from the beginning. In kindergarten, once, she and Amy hadn’t wanted to take their scheduled naps, so they hid under a school table. Of course, they got caught. It was a scene and memory that Amy never forgot.
    A little girl can cope with only so much, and eventually Regina began to mutilate herself. It started out innocently enough—she would scratch mosquito bites until they bled and scabbed over, a tendency that seemed typically childlike at the time.
    But Regina picked at the scabs until they formed scars all over her legs. This picking became an obsession with her, primarily because of her mother’s overreaction to the situation. Toni Hartwell always grounded her daughter for two weeks for scratching mosquito bites. That harsh discipline for mosquito-bite scratching made little, hardheaded Regina that much more determined to scratch the bites.
     
     
    When Regina Hartwell was seven years old, her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Toni was only thirty-two years old then, and her life expectancy, because of the MS, was now only 43.4 years. Months later, Toni was discharged from her $4.25 an hour job at Channel Sheet Metal.
    Life wasn’t feeling so good.
    Amy was back again at Regina’s. This time, Amy infuriated Toni. Mrs. Hartwell was so irate that she walked next door to the Seymoures’ and knocked on the door. Amy’s mother opened the door.
    “Amy and Regina are no longer allowed to play together,” Toni Hartwell said. And she turned around and walked back into her own yard and house.
    For the next six months to a year, the girls were not allowed to play together.
    The two children had been playing together every day for five or more years. They had attended Children’s University Pre-School and Kindergarten together. They attended the same elementary school. They saw each other at school everyday.
    But when Regina and Amy came home from school, they saw each other only from their driveways. Little Amy stood in her driveway, little Regina stood in her driveway, and they talked to each other from their concrete drives. Because of Toni Hartwell, Amy was not allowed to step a toe into the green grass of Regina’s yard. And Regina was certainly not allowed to step a toe onto the much greener grass of Amy’s yard.
     
     
    “Can I have a piece of watermelon?”
    Toni Hartwell looked at her daughter and grimaced. She felt like hell. The pain from her MS was torture, creeping into her body, hardening her brain tissue, hardening her spinal tissue, causing tremors, nearing her toward paralysis, destroying her life. She hurt. Horribly.
    “I just want a piece of watermelon,” said Regina.
    Toni didn’t want to get up. She couldn’t. It hurt.
    “I want a piece of watermelon.”
    Toni got up, went into the kitchen, hefted the heavy melon onto the table, ripped a knife into it as if it were a fish to be gutted, and slid the ripe fruit in front of Regina.
    “Here.”
    Regina stared from the melon to her mother, and back again.
    “You wanted watermelon, you got it. Eat it. Eat it all, and don’t stop until it’s all gone.”
    “But . . . ,” stammered Regina, “I just wanted