Is this how it starts? Or is it simply anxiety? Are my hands trembling because I’m infected, or am I tired? Does my head hurt, my stomach hurt, my throat hurt because I’m scared, or is this how I’ll die? How can I die when I don’t know what it means to live?

Maybe I should leave with Hunter and his friends. The very thought of it terrifies me. I don’t trust them not to hurt me. I don’t trust them to protect me. But how can I trust the people in here?

Maybe I should go home. I bite my lip. Like my parents would accept a fugitive from the Hope Juvenile Treatment Center. The very thought of it. I don’t want to imagine what would happen if I showed up at their doorstep now.

Except.

My chest aches at the thought of home. I miss it. I miss my room with its soft bed covered with cushions, the shelf full of sheet music, and the musty, sea-green curtains. I miss the songs from the record player drifting from the living room to every corner in the house. I miss the smell of the lasagna my mom cooks.

I miss the home I thought I knew back when I was who my parents thought I was. It was the only place where I’ve ever felt completely protected from the evils of the world. And I want to feel safe again. I want to curl up against my father on our faded leather sofa and hear his voice rumble in his chest when he tells me it’ll all be okay, that God has a grand plan for me.

“Even in the darkest times,” he told me, “if you follow God’s light, He will be with you. If you’re overwhelmed and scared, pray, and He will give you purpose and peace.”

I still believed that. I want to believe it now.

But I tried to pray, when they kicked me out. When my so-called friends turned me away and I spent nights out in the open. When I wandered into churches in search of warmth or food or recognition. I never felt any lighter.

In that half year between my parents shutting the door on me and the police arresting me, the only real peace I ever felt was in a drop-in house in Little Rock, where I met a trans girl with kind eyes and a penchant for chaos. Mica. We only spent two days together before she disappeared to another shelter, but she accepted me. She called me Emerson. She stole clothes for me that clung to my body in all the right places. She danced around my mistrust like it didn’t exist. She helped me cut my hair. After everyone who made me feel broken, she was the first to see me whole.

That was peace. Whatever God’s light was supposed to be, it had only given me pain.

I try to pray now—in the privacy of my own room—but I might as well be talking at a wall. At the broken wardrobe. At my violin case.