One quarter, two dimes, six nickels, two pennies. Seventy-seven cents—a geography of presumption pressed warm into my seven-year-old palm. On any other afternoon, those 11 metal discs would have whispered of school fair dreams:––holographic stickers catching light, pencils crowned with rainbow promise. Instead, they became a cartography of silence, a map tracing the unspoken borders of childhood, race and identity.
