Gwen’s laughter impaled my imagination, sending me flying along the tropical vines with each of her exquisitely heaved guffaws. 

We couldn’t sit on the sofa in the house growing up. My mother didn’t allow it. The probability of spill, scratch, or rip was not entirely remote, so the couch remained shrouded in a plastic cover.

When I was a kid, I had this friend named Sunshine. Sunshine’s house was filthy, and if I walked barefoot on her family’s tile floors, the soles of my feet would turn gray-black.