I still remember him clearly.
He had those sleep-flushed eyes from too many hours hunched over textbooks and his fingers smelled like peeled clementines.
We sat on my bed, and he was smiling, not expecting me to shift the mood entirely.
But the story that defined my entire life? It goes like this...
I was sixteen—you know, that age when you are more certain about your life decisions than when you are close to thirty—when I told my mother I wanted to study literature at Columbia.
She didn't even lift her eyes from her glossy magazine, just:No. Business.Like that was the only key to my college fund. Like she hadn't seen me scribble stories since before I could spell. Like the one thing that made me feel alive was absolutely irrelevant.
I begged, begged until she laughed at me, called me pathetic and urged me to calm down.
But sixteen years of dismissal corked inside didn't calm me.
I snapped, snatched the magazine from her hands and before I could stop myself, I hurled it.
It clipped her favorite vase, the blue Bohemian crystal she always bragged about because she bought it for a third of the price and everyone admired it.
The paper hit it with some supernatural force and itcrashed across the carpet, splattering into a thousand pieces. And so did she.
She lurched up and slapped me—so hard, it knocked me sideways and my teeth cut my lip when I hit the floor.
I looked up at her with my eyes wide, tasting blood, but she didn't apologize, just screamed, "Pack your bag, get out, get out, get out!"
Crying, I ran upstairs, shoved my life into one small backpack and walked to the bus stop in front of our house, hoping she would stop me.
She only watched me from the window, like a ghost in her house that I couldn't call home anymore.
"Christ," Ben's voice cut through the story, pausing me.
I could feel my cheeks flushed scarlet like I was slapped all over again, only with shame this time, so I killed the bedside lamp before he could see it.
He didn't comment on it, just let the room turn into shadows, and asked, "What did you do?"
"I sat down on the curb, waiting for the bus, and when it came, I looked up from the window and thoughtWow,the sunset, the colors.I still remember them so vividly, how unreal they were, and how I was completely caught up. Then I thought,Nothing this gorgeous should hurt this muchand I hated them ever since. They always break me."
Ben blew a pained breath. "But she reached out, no? Apologized? Asked you to come back?"
I shook my head. "No. Dad called a few times, tried to mediate. My mother, though? I haven't seen her in a year."
"What?!" He blinked hard. "Where did you go?"
I told him about the basement flat with my four flatmates—three strangers and the mold. It always smelled like wet carpet and stale hope, and I kept coughing.
I told him even about the bar shifts, where nasty, drunk men pressed against me, hands roaming my hips, and me not always fighting them so hard as I should have.
Not because I didn't want to, but because I had no other choice. I needed money, and at least those hands weren't slapping me.
I didn't spare him a detail, didn't sugarcoat anything, but when I mentioned my flatmates were doing drugs Ben went very stiff.
"Have you ever—?"
"Yes," I admitted before I could dress it up. "The nights stretched forever and I felt like I needed something to help me feel happy again. When someone offered me a short, I took it."
He swallowed hard and his voice snagged in his throat. "What kind?"
"Never the hard stuff." I rushed out, defensively. "Just pills. One of the flatmates had a pharmacist as a friend. It was enough to keep me awake, then enough to knock me out."
