 Nonfiction, mostly narrative, true stories. And lately, I've been focusing a lot on my relationship with my brothers or with my dad. And so I wanted to read one that's a little bit more squarely about me. And this one's called The Champ. It's 1980, and I'm nine years old. And I'm walking home from Longview Elementary in Central Phoenix. When this curly-haired boy calls out, hey, do you want to fight me? So I say, OK. I'm a tomboy, and since I dress like a boy, I'm expected to fight like one, too. And I figure I can take this kid, since I'm already three and 0 for grade school fights. When I was seven, my gang of kids, the 12th Street Furies, modeled after Fonzie's gang on happy days, split up into two smaller gangs because we wanted to have a gang fight, not for some turf war or any kind of actual conflict. We just knew from TV that gangs are supposed to have gang fights, so we picked teams. Somehow, all the younger kids ended up in my gang and all of the older brothers in the opposing gang. On fight day, my little band of seven-year-olds and I squeezed through some oleanders to get to our hideout, and we took out our pocket mirrors. I don't know where we got the mirrors, but the plan came from an episode of The Bionic Man. We were going to reflect the sun into the eyes of the opposing gang members and blind them. So the four of us crouched into position with our pocket mirrors, but the three older brothers suddenly came crashing through the oleanders. And with big David Koza viciously tackled little Eric Koza, my gang was still twisting and turning the little mirrors. And when David grabbed a handful of Eric's hair and swung his head toward the pavement, some of the 12 street fairies started to cry. I probably shouldn't have counted this one as a win, but I was the only member of my gang that didn't cry. So I counted it as a half-win that I added to my other half-win, which was the time I got kicked out of the summer zoo program for pushing a kid into a cactus patch. Another time I was walking home for second grade, swinging my aluminum Happy Days lunchbox. When this girl Rosie popped up with a skinny pale boy dressed in an entirely white cowboy outfit, white pants, white Western shirt, pointy white cowboy boots, it was like this kid's parents addressed him specifically to be the good guy. Rosie jabbed her thumb at the kid and said, he wants to fight you. I said, OK. I faced off with the white cowboy. I was ready for a punch, but instead he suddenly kicked my shins with those pointy cowboy boots. Pop, pop, pop. And I hopped away from him, but he just kept coming, pop, pop, until I was crying and desperate. So I gripped my little fist tightly on the handle of my Happy Days lunchbox and walloped him over the head. The shin pain stopped, but I was still crying when the cowboy tapped my shoulder. He slowly patted his hand on the top of his head and pushed his palm toward my face, his little hand covered with blood. I screamed. I ran all the way home. It took the adults until the following Tuesday to catch up with me. They told me the little cowboy had been taken to the hospital for stitches. If I had been honest, I would have told the adults that I'd been wanting to test out my lunchbox like this for years. I figured that the little cowboy kid had similar ideas about his pointy boots, so I was secretly proud that I had chosen the superior weapon. Then there was the chipper-smithy incident, just after I'd turned nine. You see, instead of really teaching us how to fight, my dad, who is five foot six, told all three of his tiny kids to make friends with the toughest kid in the class. So Joe, who was eight, befriended chipper. But chipper only looked tough because he was dirty. Chipper was the kid who gave the whole school headlice. And then one night, chipper spent the night at the McCloy house just after my dad had bought two pairs of boxing gloves at a yard sale. It was Friday night, and my brothers and I had been begging my dad for a chance to get at those gloves all week. I still can't explain why my parents agreed to have a grade school boxing match right in our own living room. Maybe it was because a few weeks earlier, my dad had sold our television. Maybe without the TV, my family was just bored enough for blood sport. In any case, the couches were pulled back, and chipper and I both won our coin flip. We suited up with the boxing gloves, me with my bowl haircut and my pulled-up knee socks, and chipper a head taller than me and six pounds heavier. I really expected a dance. I clapped my gloves together. I bounced on the balls of my feet. The bell sounded, which was actually my little brother saying, ding. Chip came at me like De Niro in raging bowl. He got me with a hook to the chin, and then hammer, hammer, rights and lifts coming at my face, bat, bat, nonstop. With both forearms shielding my head, I sunk under this pummeling thinking, why me, Chipper Smitty? I had completely forgotten that just two hours earlier, my father had come home to see the kid who had given the whole school head lice sitting on our couch. And he told Chipper that he should take a shower, and Chip had said, what are you going to make me? Which was a mistake, because my dad ended up dumping Chipper fully clothed into the shower with the water running. So now the misplaced vengeance of Chipper Smitty rained down on me, a rabbit punch, a left hook, and finally an uppercut that knocked the wind out of me. As I struggled to regain my breath, I was finally fed up. I plowed into Chipper and pinned him against the screen door and punched him and punched him. This deep satisfaction ran through my body as I made damn sure that Chipper couldn't raise his arms to hit me again. That's right, I thought. Take that, I thought. Finally, my dad pulled me off of him. Chip sunk to his knees on the floor, and that's when I felt a little sad for him right when I noticed his hair was still wet from that shower he'd been dumped into earlier. The fight was declared a technical knockout. Chip never spent the night at our house again. And my brother had to look for a tougher friend since this one had been beaten up by his sister. So when the curly-haired kid yells out, do you want to fight? I say, OK, because I am 3 and 0, and the Chipper Smitty win is just a few months old. Before I could take the next breath, the kid charges across the street, knocks me down, and pins me in my front yard. I can't kick him because his knees are on my thighs, and I can't punch him because his hands are pinning my shoulders. I twist and struggle, but I can't move an inch. You think you're so big, my captor says. And then his throat makes that hocking sound. I twist my head in the grass to look for help, looking through all this blurry yellow and green all the way to the porch to my little brother Joe's shoes. Yes, he's right there. He's standing there laughing at me. The curly-haired kid lets a drip of spit suspend from his mouth. Just as the drip separates from his lip, crunch, crunch, there's the sound of car tire on gravel. My neighbor's car pulling up. Thank God, and my assailant runs away. I sit there in my front yard, stunned, thinking, wow. Someone could hold me against my will and do anything. The feeling is so scary that I immediately die for cover under more traditional gender roles. I love it when my dad says, we'll take you to your big brother Bill's wrestling practice so you can point out this little prick and let Bill take care of it. On the day of the next practice, my whole family piles into our Volkswagen to go to the wrestling gym like we're going to the movies. And that's when I take a closer look at Bill sitting next to me gnawing on his thumbnail. His teeth move from thumb to index finger to middle finger as he chomps away and squints through his thick glasses at the comic book he's reading. My big brother Bill, age 11, skinny, pale, nearsighted, and asthmatic. As we enter the gym, Bill pulls me aside by this stack of mats that smells like Ben gay and sweat. He's over there, I say, pointing out curly across the gym. Bill looks at me with what I hope is fierceness and determination. He sticks his comic book back in his back pocket. He takes off his glasses and wipes him on his shirt. He whispers, I'm not going to fight your fight. He slinks off to the locker room and I really hate him in that moment. Later, I will understand that he's right. Later, I will think about how my dad put Bill up to this without ever teaching him how to fight. I will remember how Joe had just laughed at me when I was pinned on the lawn. It was just make friends with the toughest kid in the class, not here's how to stick up for your sister or your brother. Later, I will wonder if my dad kept us divided so that we would not stand together against his own violence. But now, I'm just a tomboy with a three in one record and I'm looking around this huge gym that hosts fighting lessons for hundreds of boys and not one girl. I watch a wrestler dive down low to grab another kid's legs using the same double leg takedown Curly had used on me. Right then, I realize it's time to hang up my champ's belt because the whole damn thing is rigged.