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WHEN MY FAMILY FIRST MOVED TO AMERICA, we lived in a tiny apartment that lacked the basics of functionality and excelled in the advancements of rat infestations. Rachel and I shared the only bedroom while Dad slept on the couch, and we didn't even have a real kitchen, just a microwave oven and a mini-fridge. Our neighbor upstairs was a drug dealer that tried to convince my dad that weed was English for lettuce. In fact, he was the reason I had my first drug encounter: our apartment complex had our own block party once, and he was in charge of bringing the brownies. He accidentally got his pot brownies confused with his normal brownies, and, let's just say that I ate the entire tray.
Our landlord didn't let us throw any more block parties after that.
At night, I liked to torment Rachel by describing the monsters that hid underneath our beds and deep inside of our closet in vivid detail. She'd promptly burst into tears whenever I so much as mentioned them: the idea of these monsters lurking, unseen, unheard, unknown, traumatized her as a young girl, which only served to fuel me.
However, as my stories became more and more realistic, and as Rachel became more and terrified, I began to believe them, too. Within days, we were both living in constant fear of these monsters. They were out to get us, white teeth that glinted like shards of bloodied ice in the sun, eyes stained brown with muck, spongy flesh-colored maws gaping and dripping with thick slobber and their own blood. They waited in the dark; they hungered in the dark; they were in the dark. They were out to get us, and, like, I still had so much to live for. Like tracking down our drug dealer neighbor and convincing him to give me more pot brownies.
Eventually it became evident that the only way for us to defeat these monsters was to tell Dad. So we did, and he came into our room one night, looked in the closet (didn't find me in there), checked under our beds, examined the curtains, noticed through the window the ominous stains on the wall of the duplex next door. "Yep," he'd declared, although back then we'd all communicated solely in Italian, pursing his lips together and nodding and placing his hands on his hips in decisiveness. "This place is definitely monster infested, all right. Watch out for their claws."
Then, he'd left us to fend for ouselves. Terrified, we'd stayed up the entire night, huddled together underneath the blankets on my bed, armed with flashlights and a war-torn Barbie doll each.
The next morning, a warm summer's day, we begged for Dad to do something, anything, everything to help us. He'd just sighed, put his hands on his hips like he did, and said, "Well, I guess it's high-time I teach you both to fight monsters."
So we'd spent that afternoon at the park with the pointiest sticks we could find—except they weren't sticks in our minds, no. They were swords, dazzling, shimmering, deadly swords with ruby-encrusted hilts and our names engraved on the blades and the blood of our enemies pulsing somewhere deep inside of them. And we weren't kids, no. We were gladiators, battle-hardened and fused with the strength of the gods, ready to fight to the death to defend our new country—to defend our home.
