People always assume if you’re top of the class, your life must be pretty put together. Mine was the opposite. I used to hide my backpack behind the dumpster behind school, not because I was scared it’d get stolen—but because I was sleeping back there too.
My mom and I ended up homeless my junior year. She lost her job at the dental office, then the apartment, and we started living in her old minivan. She tried to shield me from it, you know? She’d park at the 24-hour laundromat so I could pretend we were just doing laundry late. But I knew. I knew when she’d skip meals. I knew when I started getting rashes from not showering for days.
