She never cried.


Not that it was what people had noticed, but I did. I being the chubby little underachiever in the family, the one who everyone else overlooked. I didn’t really cry either, but that was expected. Can’t truly mourn the mother you never even knew.


But Alice did. She was the daughter that they had to drag out of that foul-smelling house, the girl that defiantly screamed “State ain’t gonna take me nowhere!” and spat in the police officer’s face. I however, sat quietly back in the car and complied with all their orders.


My grandmother was happy to have us, but I knew that was probably a lie. There was the same darkness in her eye when she looked at us like the social worker had, the darkness that asked if we were just going to turn out carbon copies of her, if we were even worth trying to save. We were an obligation, another responsibility that she grudgingly accepted.


Mother was rarely home, and when she was it was a nightmare. Screaming, crying, broken dishes littering the corners of the floor. That was home sweet home for the first eleven years of my life.


The next seven were spent in my grandmother’s care, hiding away in my room doing homework. I made honor roll, won various academic awards, but none I brought to my grandmother’s attention. I knew she was too busy with my lost cause of a sister.


Alice used to be sweet, she really was. I guess all those years of swears and slaps had broken her. Those days she was just trying out drugs, nothing too serious. A sip of whiskey here, a couple drags of a joint there. But then came the other stuff, the really bad stuff, and she was gone too.


My Alice fell down a rabbit hole.


I graduated high school valedictorian, but nobody was there to celebrate with me. I don’t think my grandmother knew that I had still been in high school. She might have even assumed that I had dropped out.


But that didn’t matter to me the bright morning I did my meticulously planned class speech and ended my high school days for good. Looking down into the audience, I had Trisha and Ashley cheering me on.


They were the few like-minded people who managed to find each other in a campus filled with mean bimbos and overly cocky football players. We spent sleepovers studying flash cards and watching documentaries, going to vegan restaurants just for the experience. All accepted into Stanford, we were never going to drift apart. They were my family, my true family.


And you know what? They’re all I really needed.