THE PARENTS

The pediatrician had no openings that day. Instead, my mom got me an appointment with Willa, a doctor who worked in the same office block as my dad. The two of them weren’t friendly, but I couldn’t imagine Willa being anyone’s friend. She was cold and white and angular, like the unit where she worked, and she only saw patients who were adults. I took this to mean she must hate children and refused to even look at us, unless it was a favor for a colleague. This intrigued me. At seven years old, I vowed to be so perfectly obedient, she’d have to admit she was wrong. This was normally the sort of task I thrived on. But that afternoon, I was doubled over in pain.

The ache was there when I woke up that morning. It was low and urgent, like my dad’s voice when we had to catch an early flight, all the lights flicked on and his mouth by my ear: Wakey-wakey. When I moved, the pain moved with me, flaring and then sharpening to a point. In our house, pain, like most things, came with rules. If something hurt, you weren’t supposed to take a pill for it. You had to wait three days, as if you were in a riddle or a fairytale. If the pain changed within that time, it probably meant that you were getting better, so then what did you need the pill for?

This wasn’t cruelty, or it wasn’t meant to be. Just an instance of a different rule: There was the way most people got away with doing things. Then there was the way expected of me. But this symptom, a throb in my low belly, had launched my parents into action. They skipped the three-day rule and took me straight to the doctor. The speed of it made me uneasy. Too many of their decisions were unusual—to quickly hand me off to someone else. To share their power over me so easily. My parents’ rules, rigid and unwinnable, might unnerve me, but worse was the moment when they dropped away.

I lay back on the examination table. Willa plucked my shirt up by the edge and placed a hand on my stomach. I shivered at the chill. Willa. Her name was so gentle, like a soft plea for permission. I would never say it to her face. I only thought of her as Willa because that was what my dad called her. Out loud, to me, she was only Doctor.

Suddenly, without warning me or changing her expression, she pushed down hard enough to crease the paper underneath me. I gasped and kicked my legs out. She had done that knowing it would hurt. The bright, sterile room was suddenly shaded with danger. Willa, I realized, was like the cruel vet in Homeward Bound, a movie about three household pets who trek across California to reunite with their owners. As they wander through the wild, Chance, the impish American Bulldog voiced by Michael J. Fox, taunts a porcupine and winds up with a face full of quills. Later, when the animals get picked up and taken to a shelter, a doctor holds the dog down and extracts the needles while he whimpers in pain.

The image bored into my mind when I first saw the film. It slotted in next to the scene from The Rescuers: Down Under, when a giant albatross wakes after a crash-landing, tied up by a squad of medical mice who tell him, over his begging, that the coming suffering is for his own good. These moments electrified me, sparking a fear that contained an urge even more primal. For years, I made my friends and relatives re-enact the Homeward Bound scene with me. I would always play the dog and they the doctor. Even at the time, I could tell pretending to be an animal was good cover. I want to be a dog was so much more innocent than what I really wanted, which I knew better than to admit: to be held down. To squirm against a locked pair of arms. To pretend that someone else knew what was best for me and I had no choice but to let them do it.

This time, I wasn’t pretending. After a few more prods, Willa told me I could get down from the table. I slid off the paper and winced as I took the chair next to my mom. It was rare to have her all to myself, the way I did that day. She’d left my two younger siblings with someone else, possibly her own parents, while my dad saw patients in a different office. Being alone with my mom made me feel vaguely guilty. I didn’t mind that my siblings often got more of her than I did. But her attention was a gift I was meant to earn by doing well, not steal because something had gone wrong.

My eyes flicked between my mom and Willa, waiting for tension. Around other adults, my mom was serious and slow to smile—the opposite of how she was with anybody’s kids, not just her own. Like meetings with my teachers or encounters with our neighbors on the street, the doctor’s office was a place where she was often underestimated. She was thirty-one but looked twenty-one. Because she was young, people didn’t believe she had three kids. Because she was black and her husband was white, people didn’t believe we were hers.

Willa started running down a list of questions.

“Any loss of appetite?” She addressed this to my mom rather than to me.

“You can ask Tajja,” my mom said, neutrally.

There it was—Willa’s first mistake. Adults should talk to us like we were adults and we would treat them with the same respect. If my dad had been there, things would have been even more tense. Since he was a doctor, too, he liked to challenge other doctors even when he knew they might be right.

I told Willa no; my appetite was fine. My voice was bright. Now that I was off the table, I could relax. Even better, this was familiar ground: an adult was asking me questions and my job was to be articulate and well-behaved. I understood this as a trial and my answers my defense. If I did well, she would give me the cure and let me go. We went over my symptoms, my history, my digestion. I maintained eye contact and answered each question in full sentences and without saying um. I was in my element. I could go on forever, if she wanted.

“Okay,” Willa said, at last. “I’d like to do a blood test.”

I bristled with betrayal. My act slipped. “But I don’t want to.”

Up till then, I still believed the fix would be external. To let her into my body was an admission not just of my failure to be good, but that the problem might be serious—serious enough to set me on the mysterious, painful track I’d been planning to avoid by being articulate and well-behaved.

I was expecting her to override me. What else was a doctor’s power for, if not to make me do things that I ought to do but never would have chosen? This was the threat, and the thrill, of lying on the table.

“Fine,” she said, tightly. “We’ll skip it.”

In a single moment, I had torn down the image of myself I’d spent the whole appointment building up. I was flooded by a shame so consuming, the only way I thought I’d ever outlive it was if I wiped both her memory and mine. I’ll do it slipped out of me against my conscious will. I had come here hoping to be good; now, I’d been tricked into doing what I was most afraid of. But inside me something blazed; something deeper and keener and harder to bear than the ache at my core. An order left unfulfilled, by a person I understood to be superior, wounded my idea of myself to a degree I couldn’t stand. I would rather run towards the terror than leave a thing I had been told to do undone.

Like many things I feared, I understood this as a threshold. The moments that scared me the most also possessed the rare and precious power to brighten my pilot light. Even when somebody made me suffer, that same experience could make me feel unbearably alive, sharpened into a clarity I longed for when it wasn’t there.

I put my head in my mother’s lap and squinted up at the fluorescents. The door swung open and my fate walked in. Glass rattled on a metal tray; I smelled the tang of rubbing alcohol. I started howling as soon as the nurse’s hand appeared in my periphery. Something was about to happen. Everything could change.