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Ten years ago, I was a spy.

Secret identities, awesome spy gadgets and undercover operations consumed my imagination.

This was serious business and l took training seriously.

My brother was Public Enemy No.1. He’d come home and I’d use Mission Impossible stealth moves to follow

him everywhere. I’d pick his bedroom door with a nail file and steal his allowance. I’d climb the tree

outside his window and take reconnaissance photos.

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Like most babies, I was born with straight, glassy hair, plastered to the sides of my head and as soft as the down feathers of a magpie. I gurgled, and cried, and groped for things with little fingers, and, within three months, I was bald. The next nine months saw me

through my first smiles, the discovery of my feet, the echoing peals of unsullied laughter that bubbled from my lips like liberated balloons. I

learned to crawl backwards, collecting grounded toys between the bends of my knees as I clumsily navigated the doorframes of our

Montreal duplex. On my first birthday, as I sprayed my first birthday cake in a thin mist of candle-extinguishing saliva, I blinked out over the white icing from beneath a dense helmet of freshly grown hair.

After only one year in this exhilarating, new world, my fate had been decided: I would spend the rest of my life fighting a constant battle to

keep people’s hands away from my head.

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Hardly a day went by in Japan when I wasn’t asked by a curious and wide-eyed Japanese person, “How

many guns do you own?” This was almost never preceded by the question “Do you own a gun?” Being

from Texas, it was simply assumed that I was an experienced gunslinger.

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I feel sick. I’m nervous and my stomach’s turning. The room is lined with neat rows of desks, each one occupied by

another kid my age. We’re all about to take the SATs. The proctor has instructed us to fill out section four: “race.”

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When I was in the eighth grade, I couldn't read.