This is why I don't go into that city just across the bridge alone.

Why it's fine for me to camp completely alone in Grizzly country for a week but I don't walk city streets in daylight.

You want to know what they look like?

It's the man in the scruffy North Face who grabbed my breast in the split second my mother turned away and I was too shocked even to know what to do but stare in shock and belatedly step away and nothing else was said even though we had just stopped to ask him for directions. 

I lied to my mother that day and said I hit him. 

Even for that I blamed myself, for being, at fourteen, afraid. 

And I can still feel his hand there on my right breast, nearly ten years later. I can still see his unexpected fingers curled over the black ribbing and clear little beads on that shirt I still wear because I refused to let that be the reason I stopped wearing that shirt. 

The first shirt I ever bought that wasn't a loose and long sleeved turtleneck, because at fourteen I'd finally decided it was okay to have breasts where other people could see them.

My mother laughed. That same day she told new friends that I'd been groped, and laughed and they all told me they were proud I'd hit the man who touched me, enough that they convinced me at the time that that would have made it all right, somehow. 

You want to know what they look like? 

They look like that Christian kid from up the street, two years older and full of worldly knowledge, who truth-or-dared me into stripping naked.  And me, a wild seven who still danced naked when it rained, I only vaguely understood that the word naked, in his mouth, meant something wrong.

I don't go alone into that city across the bridge, but I do go into worlds that feel like home only to find it's all the same. When a boss that I liked and an engineering professor I respected both told me, offhand, that I didn't have to study, I could pay my way with that pretty smile.

Anyone who tells you, baby, smile, doesn't know a compliment.