My family had a tradition at Thanksgiving. I was never allowed to eat first. (Part 1)

The lead is small enough that I have to pinch it between two fingers to keep it from disappearing into the floor. It isn't a pencil. It's what's left of one, the wood long gone, just the gray stick of it, worn down to almost nothing from all the writing.

I will not steal at night.

I write it in the left column. Then again in the right column, a few inches over, because one column isn't enough — there has to be two, so it takes twice as long, so there's twice as much proof by the time I'm done. Legs straight, knees locked, hands flat on the floor on either side of the paper, bent all the way forward at the waist until my face is close enough to see nothing but the blank floor around it. There's no part of this position that gives, no way to shift the weight off one part of me onto another — it's built to hurt everywhere at once, all the time, for as long as it's held, and my hands shake a little by the time I've written it forty, fifty times, because that's exactly what it's built to do to a kid.

I will not steal at night.

There's a bologna sandwich next to me on the floor. That's dinner — not the table, not what everyone else is having, just bread and a single slice of meat, eaten in pieces between lines, bent double the whole time because nobody said the punishment stops for food. I stole real food once, in the middle of the night, so now real food isn't something I get to have while I'm being reminded not to do it again.

Upstairs — or maybe it's just across the room, but it feels like upstairs, it feels like somewhere I'm not allowed to look toward — I can hear the table. Forks. My father's voice doing the big warm laugh he does when other people are watching him be a good time. Someone says pass the rolls. Someone else laughs at something I don't hear the start of.

I will not steal at night.

I don't look up. Looking up costs something I don't have enough of tonight.

When it's over — when the table's plates are scraped clean and everyone's had their fill, second helpings and all, the good parts of dinner already finished without me — that's when my father's chair scrapes back and his voice goes bright, the same voice from before, like nothing happened, like I hadn't spent the whole meal bent over a piece of paper eating a bologna sandwich in pieces.

"Let's play a game!" he says, and everyone perks up because a game from Dad means the fun part of the night is starting. "Let's see how much everybody can eat in two minutes. Go!"

And I'm allowed to the table now — allowed, like it's a gift — and there's nothing left but scraps, the picked-over parts nobody wanted after they'd already eaten their fill, and I'm standing there shoveling it into my mouth as fast as I can because the game has a clock and everyone is watching and laughing, and I don't understand yet that the laughing isn't about the food.

Dogs. That's what we looked like. That's what I was, for two minutes, on Thanksgiving, in front of everyone who was supposed to love me.

Nobody at that table called it a punishment. They called it a game.

That was the first Thanksgiving I remember clearly. It wasn't the last one that went that way. It wasn't even close to the worst thing that happened in that house — I just didn't know that yet, standing there with scraps in my hands, two minutes on a clock nobody let me see.

There's more. There's a lot more. I'm going to keep writing it down, one piece at a time, exactly the way I remember it.

(Part 2 coming soon.)