Everyone knows everyone—and everything (whether personally or through the friend of a friend of a friend)—and no secrets are truly secrets.

At 14 years old, I got my period for the first time, and I thought something was wrong with me: I thought I was dying. My bed was stained with blood, which I was never able to clean out, and a shooting pain weaved in and out of my stomach, a pain similar to what I imagined getting shot felt like. I wanted the pain and bleeding to stop.

When I bled for the first time, it was the middle of the night. At first, I thought I was actually shot, something that I wouldn’t have been surprised by because the president liked to do tasks that would “toughen out our people,” whatever that meant.  Half an hour after I came home from school, a scream rang in the cold air on a random Tuesday a couple of years ago. I ran outside, and there was a girl younger than me who stumbled around the street, leaving a trail of blood behind her as she held her stomach. She never came back.

People rumoured she died, but there was a small percentage of people who thought she was still alive and now thriving somewhere in “the outside world.”

I’ve wondered about her, so I questioned my mother about her, about where she went and if I’d ever see her again, though, deep down, I just knew I wasn’t going to see her again.

“She decided she didn’t want to be with us anymore,” my mother said as she sat on the recliner in front of the television.

“What happened?”