We all met on the soccer field. We stood across from each other, hands and feet jittery, cartoon T-shirts hanging from our bony, prepubescent frames. With our dirty fingernails and scabbed skin we were ready, if not desperate, for those precious, short-lived minutes to play, to breathe in the swampy Florida air as we fumbled and crashed on the grass. We were ten-year-old Americans, the sweet musk of our uncertain brown, Black, and white bodies thick in the air. I had a hangnail sense of self; a teetering, uncertain suspicion of who and what I was. The worth of my brown skin, the onset of puberty and power, the formalized testing and grading, the filthy homes and the clean suburban houses — these were all daily questions I hoped to find answers to on that field.