When Aria was six, they lost their apartment. Lucy had pawned off everything just to afford her addiction. They moved from apartment to apartment, staying with random people that Aria didn’t know for days or weeks at a time before moving again. For the next eight months, Aria watched her mother go through seemingly endless cycles. She would come home from school to find her mother manic, high with a kind of synthetic empowerment. On days like that, Lucy would drag Aria around the town, determined to show her a good time. But Lucy was delusional. All too often her enthusiasm would turn into aggression and she would find herself in altercations. These would push Lucy into a state of energized paranoia. Several hours later, when the high would wear off, Lucy would isolate herself and succumb to hallucinations. Disconnected from reality and losing a sense of herself, she would lie under the covers of the bed or on the floor of the bathroom, itching and clawing at her skin.

For the few days following these episodes, Lucy would crash. As if she had lost the will to live, she slept away the hours. When she came back to life, she appeared starved, emaciated even. Her skin was beginning to turn gray. The exhaustion would not lift. She would exist in this state of living death for a week or so before deciding that the only way to alleviate the pain was to use again. And so she would. Giving in to the craving, Lucy began not only snorting meth but also slamming it.

The week before the state took her away, Aria could remember lying by her mother, who was passed out on the couch, staring at the track marks on her arm.

A few weeks after Aria’s seventh birthday, a school secretary came to escort Aria to the office in the middle of class. Even at that age, she knew as she walked to the office that life as she knew it was over. She was scared they were going to tell her that her mother was dead. Everything began to feel surreal. She could feel everything begin to move in slow motion. The world went silent. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath.