I hate the sound of ambulances. Whenever I hear them ring, I immediately feel a heart pain, way down deep in my gut.

It started in the eighth grade. A coven of girls had hijacked the school and split it in two.

This is one of those things I have been trying to write about for years now. One of those memories you go back to time and again, wondering why you have never fully reconciled with it.

Dinah was the school freak, couched in mystery behind a lion's mane of henna colored hair, wearing leopard skin terry cloth skirts and black fishnets in the seventh grade. I always secretly thought she was beautiful.

Sometimes when my brain would cede over to trust and a lack of junior high ego, I would lie in my bed at night and wonder what I would feel like if I decided to suddenly dye my hair purple or wear jet green eyeliner.

It was June of that year. A group of students was formed outside in front of the bus that would take me home. It was a hot summer day and I sat in the second from the last row clutching my notebook and candy bar to my chest. I looked out the window to the concrete sidewalk below and saw a group of students all forming a circle and bending inward. I could not see the center, or what the kids were looking at.

Suddenly a short and curvy Brazilian woman came running from the double doors of the school grasping her mouth in horror and crying. I just knew she was Dinah's mother.

Certain girls in that grade always threatened to kick someone's ass and intimidated every girl of the week with abandon. But nothing ever became of those idle threats. Sure, every once in a while two girls might face off behind the PE locker rooms after hours but only long enough to bitch slap for five seconds without being pulled apart by rumor-inspired teachers.

But this wasn't like that. This was something you never really expected to see while couched in the experimentations of pubescent bullydom. As the crowd emerged to let the mother in, I saw Dinah sitting slumped in the middle, clutching her right eye. The bus offered a jolt and then left the schoolyard.

I felt sick to my stomach.

A girl on the bus glazed over for a minute, stopped her momentous gossip tirade and sat back in her seat.

"There was so much blood," she said. " So much blood."

Just like a pack of hyenas, I thought. A sink full of dirty dishwater girls and one saint.