Growing up, one of author Cashai Pier Paid’s guardians told her that when she was born, the doctor shaved her hair off and stuck needles in her head so that she would live. She is the only human being alive with a two-page birth certificate; born to a teenage mom in the 1970s, Cashai had two babies of her own by the time she was sixteen. At the time her mom got pregnant with the author, she already had a three-month-old baby elder sister. Her street life started at the age of fourteen because of her guardian’s drug abuse and the need to be a mother to feed her younger siblings.