At home, your bedroom is immaculate. You’ve never left so much as a sock on the floor. You know your aunt would never say this, but she wishes you would. Wishes you, for once, would put a cup down without using a coaster, would forget to take your dirty sneakers off at the door. But no matter how many nights you sleep in this bed, with its gingham coverlet that your aunt sewed by hand, or how many meals you eat that your uncle has cooked from his well-thumbed copy of the Joy of Cooking, or how many medals you earn and how many checks they write for your track uniforms and your Honors Society dues and your dresses for homecoming and prom, you will never believe that this life is yours, that there isn’t a shadow version of yourself out there, picking through dumpsters for scraps and checking the slots of pay phones for change, a shadow self that you are going to have to join one day, because a person can’t live split in two forever.

When you first came to live with them, your uncle wept when they said you had scabies, lice, a urinary tract infection, then looked at you with a face full of guilt. For crying in front of you? For not stepping in earlier? For waiting until you spent three nights in a home after your mom was arrested, simply waiting for someone to come? You were like a stray dog in from the street. This was a form of care, but why did it feel so much like punishment? The doctor studying you, examining you with his blood pressure cuff and his tongue depressor and the little light he shined in your nose and ears, asking questions that embarrassed you. The psychologist, who found different ways of asking you if anyone had ever touched you. Any of the strange men—dealers, one-night stands—who used to come by the apartment. She asked so insistently, reassured you, in so many different ways, that you could tell her anything, that you started to wonder if it was wrong that no one had. How were you supposed to tell her they were always too high to even know you were there?