Ann Margaret Lim, Contributor

I knew Devon from, well, I can't remember exactly, but I don't think I was even eight when he started working for my father - making belts. I don't even know how old he was, but he was young, either almost or just twenty.

He was a staple in my life, like being picked up from school and waiting at my father's little belt factory until five in the afternoon and then going home; a staple like the sugar bun or some of my stepmother's lunch of rice and peas and fried chicken and vegetables that I would eat while waiting at the factory to go home.

There were many men at the factory who came and left, but Devon outstayed them. My father, who wasn't easy to work with, never accused him of stealing, laziness or any of that. And Devon was the one who spoke to me about school, athletics and all. He was a bright one, I think. He had his biology books at work with him, studying during small breaks, and he liked the idea of learning. He also loved bikes. I think when he finally left the factory he went to work at a garage where they fixed mostly bikes.

My memories of the good Christmases involved him. I remember the factory parties and Devon. I remember many things and Devon. I even remember once peeking at him in the changing room and seeing a blemished back and a torso with the defined muscles of a poor, hard-working youth, and feeling something weird and guilty in me.

In the summer of '88 I was 12, and excited about my new life that was about to start at high school. The truth is, I wanted to go to a co-ed school, like my prep school. But my father hated that idea, and so did my stepmother. Instead I was persuaded that St. Andrew High School for Girls was a good school.

In June, I had graduated from prep school and had processed my hair. Well, it wasn't actually creamed, but my stepmother allowed the hairdresser to press it for graduation, after I had asked my father.

'Why would you want to damage your hair? Look how pretty and black and curly it is!' he said dejectedly, as if I had told him that I wanted to process his hair. After all, his hair wasn't the one on my head. His hair was half-Chinese, soft, black, wavy and shiny. It didn't need a comb yanking through it.

But mine wasn't his. It was an annoyance my Chinese stepmother had to deal with. She never really said so, but it showed in the weird way the plaits would corkscrew up in the air and look different from everybody else's. Plus, I never had those cute cornrow or cane row hairstyles. It was always plaited in four or five or six; sometimes, thankfully, there would be bubbles.

Once my stepmother and her sister went on a holiday to the Caribbean and my father combed my hair to go to school. Well, he didn't really comb it, he caught the middle in an elastic band, after making some sort of circular part, and the rest of my hair was left out. It was the style the Samurai warrior combed his son's hair in, in a movie we saw. It was also the style my father combed my brother's hair in: to show that brother and sister had the same hairstyles. But my brother was only quarter Negro and I was only quarter Chinese.

To tell the truth, I liked having the same hairstyle as my brother. I loved him very much. (He died. It's hard to talk of him in the past, but that's the way of English). Plus, I liked the fact that my father combed my hair. But at school they gathered around me and laughed. And the teachers laughed too, saying something about a jacket. But that was a long time ago; when I was six, I think.

So as soon as I could I combed my own hair, which was also an annoyance to me since it was so thick. I think that's mainly how I developed my biceps, not by playing with my uncle's dumb-bells.

'Thick and lovely,' strangers would say. But for me, it was different from all the hair in my family; it stood out; like me.

I always knew I had a pretty smile; everyone told me that, from teachers to my stepmother - everyone. But I figured that that's where the pretty stopped, since they never told me I was pretty. Plus, at the birthday parties I was the only black one, since I never went to the parties of those at school, just those of my stepmother's friends' children. And at one party, this girl told me that her mother said she was not to play with black kids.

So I never knew I was pretty growing up, not until that summer before high school when Devon sat me down under the cherry tree in the backyard and gave me my first birds-and-bees speech.

By that time, the factory had moved to the house we were living in. My father had built on some extra rooms around the side and back.

'Lisa, you're growing into a very beautiful young woman. You're blossoming and boys will want to be around you, not like at prep school, but differently. I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to them, but don't let them force you to do what you don't want to and don't feel that you have to do anything with them.'

'But Devon,' I interrupted, 'I'm not going to do anything with them.'

I remember that he looked at me strangely, the way Richard Chamberlain always looked at the girl in The Thornbirds, the girl he eventually left the priesthood to marry. The girl he loved from she was a child.

I knew then how Devon felt about me. He even started saying it. 'Lisa, just make sure that he loves you like,' and he just stared off into space and said: 'I'm going back to work.'

In my room afterwards, I sat on my bed beside the window, hugged up Penny, my shaggy Chitsu teddy, and thought about it.

I always wanted a bicycle, but my father said that girls shouldn't ride bicycles or have them, although as a child I had a tricycle. Devon was the one who taught me to ride his bicycle. He was the one I called when I mastered it and showed him that I could ride in circles. Devon spoke with me like the person I was. He loved the Godfather like me. We even spoke about Marvin Hagler, Ali, Joe Frazer and all that stuff of my tomboy-hood. And Devon saw the girl in me. How long had he seen it for?

I knew there was something growing in me for him, something weird, but I just thought it was me. I never knew it was him, too.

Not long after that day under the cherry tree, something happened. I don't remember what I did. Maybe I didn't eat all my breakfast, or said something about it - that memory's hazy. Plus, sometimes when my father decides to be upset he just gets upset.

So something happened, I did something, and my father laid into me like a madman. It was no longer a beating, it became a choking and I started to gag, and he accused me of pretending. God knows I wasn't pretending. I was choking. And I think Grandma convinced him that I wasn't pretending and he walked away, cursing me. I went into my room thinking about a knife and a wrist, or a knife and a neck, or a rope.

Just a couple weeks before high school, and it was one of those mad, groundless beatings, as if he were on the weed again - the weed which we were all convinced he couldn't control. The weed which made him mad back in '83 when he came back from England and would have beat the sh-t out of me if my grandma didn't stop him.

To be fair to my father, he didn't beat me all the time; but those sporadic ones were tinged with madness. They went beyond beating. I used to feel sorry for him, but I don't anymore.

That same day, the day of the beating, Devon left the factory and I never saw him again. Right after my father beat me and everyone heard the noise, Devon went up to him and resigned. He walked away that day and never came back. I saw him leaving but wasn't sure what had happened, though for some reason it felt like he was leaving for good. And when the lady who worked with my father told me next day that Devon had left because he got so angry when my father was beating me that he just upped and left, I knew what she was saying. I knew that she saw it all develop before her eyes.

Like Devon, Ms. Taffe worked for many years for my father, unlike the other guys. So she knew Devon for some time, and me, too.

- Ann-Margaret Lim