YOU ARE HAPPY, UNTIL YOU’RE not. It happens as quickly as someone throwing a bucket of cold water over your head, the way the team did that spring sophomore year when you took first place in the 400 at States. One night you are out with your friends at the diner, Amanda dragging the last nubs of her french fries through ketchup, making little zigzag tracks, Francesca picking at her fingernails and cutting her eyes across the room at the table of guys from Freemont Prep. A woman comes in, and you can tell by her walk, her posture, that she’s high. As a girl, you learned to watch for the sway in your mother’s footsteps when she was using. You can’t see the woman’s face from underneath her matted tangle of dark hair, but you break out into a sweat. It’s her, you think. After all these years, she’s come to take you back.

You realize you’ve been waiting for it, that sometime along the way your fear alchemized into something much more dangerous, something closer to hope. You wanted the pain to begin so it could be over with sooner. So that you wouldn’t have to live looking over your shoulder at every cigarette-roughened laugh that tails off in a wheezing cough.

Deep down, you wanted to be reclaimed by the life you came from, the one where the electricity was always getting shut off and you could fit all of your belongings into a pillowcase when you inevitably got kicked out of wherever you were staying. A world where you heard the headboard banging against the wall all night, while you pretended to be asleep, but secretly you opened an eye and tried to understand what was happening, whether that slapping sound of flesh on flesh was injury or love or a little bit of both. And then there might be money on the nightstand, while she slept through the morning, and your stomach raged with hunger but you knew better than to take it, to even touch it. And forget about telling her you were hungry. You’re always complaining, she’d say. You’re no fun.