Peri was born in Saint Petersburg, Florida. At age six she and her family moved to Miami. Her father worked in construction, her mother as a housekeeper. When she was eleven, her father died. She and her mother and siblings were out at an aunt’s birthday party. Peri came home early; she was having bad period cramps. When she walked into their apartment, it was the smell that hit her first, shit wafting through the house. She thought it was a dirty diaper that someone had forgotten to throw away. She headed to the bathroom to grab some Advil and lie down. But she couldn’t find it in the medicine cabinet. So she went into her parents’ room to dig through her mother’s bedside table, a forbidden act but she was in a lot of pain. That was when she found her father, hanging from his own belt, dead. He had defecated himself, a common occurrence in people who die by hanging, something about how the sphincter muscles release.

Odilie brought her hand to her mouth. She had never heard someone talk about death so openly, so defiantly, as Peri. It was frightening; it was intoxicating. Peri’s lips puckered over the straw in her drink, leaving it rimmed with red lipstick. She was a good storyteller, her eyes fervent as she continued, her face becoming even more vibrant and expressive, her eyes widening with every twist and turn.

After this incident she was burdened with looking after her three younger siblings while her mother worked. She hated it, she said. She hated handling those kids that weren’t her own, who didn’t appreciate the fact that she was sacrificing her own childhood to be their mother. Peri said that when she was feeling particularly annoyed and vengeful, she’d lock them in their shared room, give them some snacks and toys and go off into the evening. Sometimes she’d come back and someone would have soiled themselves. She would spank them, force them to clean themselves up.

Where was Peri going? Odilie asked, on those nights she left her siblings behind. “Everywhere. Nowhere. Friends’ houses. Just walking by myself for hours at a time. I wanted to be alone, away from them. They reminded me of how sad my little life was. But out there, in the city, it smelled different. Like I had choices. My father’s shit clung to everything, the smell of it. Even after we left that apartment, it was all around me, suffocating me.”