The eighties had a depressing element of missing girls with their hair parted down the middle who would never come home. Anguished parents. I had the sort of parents who warned against getting into cars with strange men & wearing cosmetics too young, a come hither odor. Clifford Olsen a household name in horrific bedtime stories of strangled teens, don’t take candy from anyone, razorblade apples. The price for being a girl was to always look over one shoulder while riding your bike, to never go in the woods alone. Photographs of weeping women, shredded clothes & the bloodstain of rape in the air like metal. I saw their faces in my dreams at night – they whispered, “Be careful.” I grew eyes in the ridges of my shoulder blades, fine-tuned instinct. The dead girls gave me a mask of indifference, to hide the adrenaline scent of fear that I might be a crusader. It has made me hard. This archetype is dangerous to predators – the cold expression of the huntress before the weapon is fired.