I’d had such a long list of jobs. All the girls I knew got the same start in the world. We were hired part-time, as hostesses or maybe retail associates. The jobs were all essentially the same: stand around, smile, look pretty, look thin, look stylish. I was told, “You are the face of this establishment,” which was given to mean I was the first person customers would see, but really meant I was nothing more than a face to them.

Those positions made the mind shrivel. Reading was not allowed, even on the slowest of days. Sitting was not allowed. I would envy the servers just for being able to walk around. Standing still was what made the ache in my feet noticeable. The clock ticked. The same songs repeated. People came; they complained or they didn’t. They left. And then, when I quit, I was left with nothing—no savings, no unemployment, no severance.

My reflection in the mirror behind the shelves of alcohol had dark circles under the eyes, thinned-out cheeks. Walking around Crown Heights had started to give me a terrifying awareness of my body. It was brittle, milky, weak. I could feel the hip bones showing through the skin. It wasn’t that I felt like a child, it was worse—I felt like a patient. My summer sundresses transformed into hospital gowns. Everyone around me looked very strong by comparison.

I’d been surviving for weeks on bodega coffee and prepackaged pastries—those little glazed things, more chemical than food, more air than bread. That afternoon, right before the interview, I’d used my pocketknife to slice open a ripe avocado because I’d read somewhere that a person could survive, however deficiently, on avocados alone. The knife had been a gift from my dad on my twelfth birthday, and it had been blunted on twigs and sharpened again and again in the woods around his house. One summer evening I made a small trap out of sticks and twine, placing food carefully inside. After dinner I found a rabbit stuck in it, its blank eyes blinking at me. I picked the animal up by its scruff and quickly snapped the neck, then slit the throat.

I was testing myself. My mom had decided to become a vegetarian, and had explained it to me this way: “I could never kill an animal, so why should it be all right to have other people do it for me?”