So I'm seven years old. Sitting in an overflow trailer behind Parker-Egin Elementary.
Parker, Idaho. Nineteen eighty-five. A town so small that if you sneezed driving through it, you'd wake up in a potato field on the other side wondering what you missed. A place where everybody knew everything about everybody. What you ate for dinner, what your dad drove, whose kid bit whose kid at church. And most importantly, if you were a kid, who was on the free lunch program and who wasn't.
I was.
And in a school with fewer than a hundred students, that wasn't something you could hide. It was part of who you were, like your last name or the color of your coat. Which in my case was whatever color the kid before me had worn it in.
There were two kinds of kids at Parker-Egin. You had the ones who showed up every morning carrying insulated lunch boxes with cartoon characters on the front, packed tight with Capri Suns and Fruit Roll-Ups and real Oreos. The actual brand. Not the off-brand chocolate sandwich cookies that came in bulk bags from the warehouse. We were a Western Family household, top to bottom. If you had it, we had the knockoff version.
