When I was 12 years old, I got my period, proudly noticed I'd finally begun to develop small rounded shapes on my chest, and began to experience a delicious reoccurring dream. I'd be riding bareback on a magnificent white stallion, and we'd fly through transparent clouds, drifting over trees laden with choices and possibilities, all ripe for the picking. On those sweet nights under my pink chenille bedspread, my steed easily morphed into a darkly handsome young man who would sweep me away to a sparkling and blissful future. I wouldn't learn of Freud until years later.

But on one summer day shortly after my 13th birthday, my world began to tilt and my special dream disappeared, never to return. My mother first noticed the crookedness in my back as I maneuvered past her in my first 2-piece swim suit. I was in a hurry to get out to the pool. I'd shaved my legs on the sly, slathered baby oil on every exposed inch of skin, and was eager to get a head start on my tan before my neighborhood girlfriends arrived.

"Wait, stop," she said, "Let me look at your back." I was startled by her sudden and unusual scrutiny and squirmed as she stared at me, trying to look over my shoulder to see what it was that warranted her attention. She studied my back for a long time, maybe wondering if there really was a reason for her to have noticed, or perhaps trying to decide whether she was obligated to do anything further.

A week later we were in the stuffy office of a pasty-faced old doctor, who showed my x-ray to my mother. He talked as if his teeth were loose, and I could barely understand him, but I did catch a few words. I heard "scoliosis" and "body cast" and "one year."

As we drove home, I thought about the kids I'd seen with arms and legs in casts, but I couldn't begin to imagine what it would be like to have a permanent cast around my whole body. How could I breathe? How could I move? Wouldn't I look really awful? I told my mother I didn't want to wear a body cast. Looking straight ahead as we sat at a stop light, she said "You have to wear it. Your back will grow bent and crooked if you don't." "I don't care," I said. "I still don't want to wear it."

The cast was a rigid heavy cylinder that began in my armpits and extended past my hips. If I took a deep breath, my flesh compressed against its hard interior. Now when I dreamed at night, I had nightmares of being steadily squeezed tighter each time I exhaled, as if I was slowly dying inside the coils of a huge boa constrictor.

But being awake was worse. The cast was thick and shaped like a barrel, and therefore so was I. No waist, no hips, not the slightest suggestion of breasts. I couldn't even see my breasts, no matter how hard I tried to suck myself in and peer down into the crack. My body was now thick and hard and shapeless.

I was about to start 7th grade at a new school, and none of my clothes fit. My mother bought me two mu-mu's, both emblazoned with large hibiscus flowers, because they were popular among her friends then, but I was repulsed. I couldn't be seen looking like this. I wept and begged my mother to let me stay home, but she said over her shoulder from the kitchen sink: "Don't be ridiculous. You have to go to school. No one will notice."

My grandmother Thelma was coming to visit. She was furious that my parents had allowed this horrible thing to be put onto my developing body, and she proclaimed loudly to anyone who'd listen that the pressure of it would stunt the growth of my breasts. Nothing, in her mind, was worse, because good breasts were your only guarantee of catching a man. I could hear her powder blue Lincoln Continental as it made its determined approach to our house. She was a two-footed driver, and her car jerked fast-and-slow, fast-and-slow, until it finally arrived in our driveway with a little screech.

She burst into my room in a flurry of chunky costume jewelry, clicking high heels and wide-brimmed hat, fuming: "Oh, good Lord in Heaven, let me see you!" Her nervous tic was working overtime and her left nostril and upper lip contorted furiously. Her sniffing and twitching made me uneasy but since I was accustomed to it, I basked in her attention.

Throwing reproachful looks at my Mother, Thelma shooed me out of the house and took me shopping. The task of finding clothes for me was daunting even for her, but she did buy me a loose-fitting long coat. It was white hopsack with a polyester lining, and it had a wide black border around the hem, sleeves, and down the opening in the front. It was so big and it covered me so completely, I felt quite invisible when I had it on. So beginning with those hot days of Indian summer, and for the next twelve months, I wore that black and white coat every time I left the house.

My new classmates were brutal. I took care to maintain physical distance from them, so no one would bump up against me and guess the truth. But though none of them knew exactly what I was hiding, my unusual appearance was enough to make me a target. "Eeeewww," they'd whine, "She's coming - quick, run!" It was as if I had a highly contagious disease. Even my teachers kept their distance, and unless I was called upon in class to answer a question, I rarely had a reason to speak all day.

At night, I began to dream I was a giant tortoise. Rocks would begin to fly at me from all directions, and I would quickly pull my arms and legs and head inside my shell for its dark, insulating protection. But I couldn't quite get all of my head inside, and some of the rocks hit me on the top of my skull, leaving painful sores.

Immediately after school I always took solace in our basement, and stayed there for long solitary hours until my mother demanded I come up to help with dinner. I was comforted by the dim shadows, the cold damp cement, the musty smell of earth and mildew, the whoosh of the huge blue pool heater as it cycled on and off. I kept my two hamsters down there, their cages on a rickety table illuminated by a bare hanging light bulb. I talked to them, told them all about school and who was friends with whom, and about the parties and sleepovers that of course I wouldn't want to go to anyway even if I was invited.

One day I put the hamsters together, and in a couple of weeks one began to swell. I became completely absorbed with the prospect of hamster babies, feverishly making preparations and choosing names for them. I placed an empty Kleenex box in the female's cage for a nest and lined it with shredded tissues. I pampered her with fruit tidbits. I also built an addition to her cage with scraps of wood, a place where her young ones could play right beside her while she kept a watchful eye on them.

When eight tiny raw babies were born one day, I was ecstatic. But the next afternoon when I burst in to see them, I discovered their mother had eaten them. A couple of little pink feet and blood-tinged shavings were all that was left. She didn't look at all guilty. In fact, she acted as if she'd never been a mother at all. My stomach convulsed and suddenly I hated my hamsters, I hated them a lot.

When I was almost 14, my cast was removed. "It's your birthday present," my mother said. "Aren't you excited?" Strangely enough, I wasn't. I lay on a table in the doctor's office, and he cut it off with a shrill power saw. The cast came off in two halves, and flakes of my dead skin sifted onto the floor. When I stood up, I thought I would levitate right up into the air. Even after I put my clothes back on, I didn't feel right. Part of me wanted to crawl back inside the familiar stiff punishment of my armor.

I dreamed that night. Rocks began to pelt me once again, thrown by unseen assailants. But this time, I had no shell to hide in.