“Sometimes, something happens in your life that marks you. That changes you forever…”

Amma pauses and watches her father, Graham, as he enjoys his breakfast in the morning sunlight. It’s the same breakfast he always has. The same one he’s had for years. Two rashers of bacon, two eggs – over easy, a slice of toast and a generous dollop of baked beans. He’s enjoying it in the same wooden chair, at the same wooden table, in the same wooden house that he has for the last thirty-odd years.

“Afghanistan?” Bryce Mason says as he braces himself against the heavy bag.

“Yup,” Amma Portland replies as she unleashes a combination of hard punches and kicks into the bag.

“You do watch the news, right?”

“No more than I have to,” Amma says, before delivering a high roundhouse that makes the chains that attach the bag to the ceiling rattle.

“They don’t even have a U.S. embassy there anymore. When they withdrew the troops, the Taliban completely took over.”

Amma replies only with a one-two-one combo and a powerful front kick that almost knocks Bryce off his feet. He takes a breath and fixes his grip on the heavy bag.

Tears stream down Andrew McLaughlin’s freckled face, blood dribbling from his prominent nostrils, staining his teeth as he lets out another long, pained wail. He sits slumped against the red brick of the school building, messy, light-blonde hair clinging to his forehead in the early morning drizzle. He brings his shaking hands up in front of his face and lets out another wail as the rain stings his grazed palms, bits of dirt peeping out from the raw grooved lines carved by the unforgiving asphalt of the playground when he’d put his hands out to break his fall.