“Hi, Mom,” I say.

This is so fucking weird.

My heart pounds. Thick, quiet awkwardness fills the air.

I turn to my mom and dad, who are both staring at the ground.

“Nora, why don’t you start?” Sarah prompts. It’s odd to hear my mother called by her first name. It’s not something I’m used to hearing from even my father, who, if he ever speaks directly to her, calls her sweetie or sugar, or something equally cheesy. But I remind myself that I haven’t been around in three years. Maybe that’s changed, too.

“We want you to go back to school,” Mom finally says.

“What?” I say, sincerely shocked by this. I’ve barely been back one day. I haven’t been to school since I left here. What’s the point in starting back now?

“We…” She pauses and plays with her hands some more. I wonder if she’ll have blisters by the end of this conversation. “We think it’s best that you go back…or try to go back…to your normal life.” Now she turns to me. “We need you to try.”

How could I possibly just go back? I’m not even the same person. But she said they need me to try, and my stomach aches a little. Why is it that after so long away from them, doing everything in my power and more to disappoint them, that I still want to please them?

“How?” I ask, so lightly I’m surprised they hear.

“You’ll start in ninth grade. You were close enough to the end of eighth to finish. And you’ll have a tutor, someone to help you catch up.”

I shake my head. “No. I mean, how…how can I just go back?”

My mother meets my eyes for the first time. She’s on the verge of crying. How can I love this woman despite everything?

“Can’t I just get my GED, and then go to college or something?”

“No,” my father says. “We can’t let you go off to college, not for a very long time.”

I want to argue with him that it would take me a long time to get my GED, I’m not smart enough for that to be easy, but I decide to keep my mouth shut.

It’s only now that I realize part of me hoped things would be different. That if I ever came back, my father wouldn’t be so cruel. And my mother might finally stand up for me.

I close my eyes and picture New York. I picture my old apartment, the streets, the subways. I hear the loud roar of the train as it passes overhead.

I open my eyes and look around. A weary mother and father who hate what I’ve become in a stuffy, too-formal room. I can’t believe I’m back here, but what better choice do I have?

Luis doesn’t want me, and even if I ran away again, I have nowhere to go.

A part of me just wants to see the city again. Why can’t I be a normal teenager in New York? At least then I can pretend to be someone else. That was what got me through my time on the streets. It would help in this, too.

I just want to belong, I want to be wanted. But I belong nowhere, and no one wants me, no one but the johns, the nasty men who paid to have sex with me.

“We need you to be normal, Anna,” my mom says. “We need it. We can’t handle more…mistakes.”

Mistakes.

“Is that what you think of me?” I say. “That I’m a mistake?”

My father says, “That’s up to you—”

“No,” my mother says, and I’m shocked when she continues, as though my father wasn’t already speaking. “You’re not a mistake. But we want you to get better. To have a chance at real happiness.”

My father glares at her, and I know she’ll hear about this later. She lowers her head, once again the good wife, but it’s too late. I saw a glimmer of something in her that I haven’t seen since I was a child.

“Okay,” I say.

Her face lights up with surprise. “So you’ll do it? Go to school, do your homework, join clubs—all of it?”

Wow, that’s asking a little much. “I don’t know about the clubs part.”

“What about chorus?” my father says.

“Yes! You had a lovely singing voice,” my mother adds.

I wince. Singing now would just remind me of more of my failures.

“Maybe give her some time to get used to it all before joining clubs or a choir,” Sarah says. “The social aspect is what will make it hardest for her, I think. So give her time to adjust. ”

“Fine,” he says. “It’s too late for her to join the Young Women’s Chorus anyway, but they’ll take new members around March or so. She has until then to ‘get used to it.’”

That’s my father. Why learn compassion now when he never needed it before?

We sit there in silence. After a minute, my mom speaks up.

“Anna, please,” she says. “Please try.”

I nod. For my mother, the mother I still hate in so many ways, I will try. Maybe I love my parents more than I’m willing to admit.

Besides, who the hell cares about what a bunch of teenagers think, right? I know I can do it; my skin is bulletproof.

Sticks and stones, fists and rope, can hurt me, but words won’t get past first base. I hold back a laugh at my stupidity.

High school. I thought that was a torture I was going to be lucky enough to avoid altogether.

Yeah, this is going to be tons of fun.

Chapter Five

We eat a quiet dinner together, me, my parents, and Sarah. It’s quiet and awkward and I hate it. Every second.

I spend my time thinking about anything except my reality. Anything but Luis and New York, my mother and father, my bedroom waiting to haunt me some more, or the whole new torture of high school waiting around the corner.

So instead I stare out the window between bites of roast beef and watch the too-still doghouse and the empty yard next door.

When my mother finally clears the table of our plates, the sun has barely gone down, but I should go to bed anyway. I need some time to process all of this.

Sarah pulls me to the side before I can head to my bedroom.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks me.

Not really, but I have to make a choice and stick to it.

I nod.

I know one thing. I’ll find a way to be okay. I always do.

“All right,” she says. “But I want you to let me know if that changes.”

I nod and head back to my bedroom without waiting for her to leave.

My bedroom.

I don’t know. Can I consider this my room now? Just because it still has my things in it? Just because it’s where I’ll be sleeping now?

That prison cell felt more like home.

At least there, nothing could remind me of what my life was like before. But in my room, there are the stuffed animals I used to talk to. These stupid pink pillows, my old sketches, and dreams. All reminding me of what it was like when I decided to leave. Why I had to go.

I made the right choice. I have to believe that.

But then what am I doing back here? Why am I not still with Luis?

It still hurts, knowing what he did to me.

I can’t think about whether or not he ever cared. He had to care, at least at the start. I remember when I first went to New York. No one would help. No one would even look at me. But he took me off the streets. Saved me. Told me I was worth something. I don’t think I knew how much I needed to hear those words until he said them. In a city of eight million people, he saw me. He picked me. That had to mean something.

I remember shivering on that lumpy old brown couch in his shoe-box apartment on that first night, and the way he whispered gently in my ear and told me everything would be okay. I hated that couch. And the peeling wallpaper. And the cockroaches. For a while, I hated everything about that apartment.

But Luis’s warm, dark voice made me feel protected and safe, like I was cupped inside two enormous hands. Somewhere along the line, however, those hands had started tightening, squeezing…

On one of the bad nights, the kind where I felt sick and started to regret everything, a guy’s filthy stare boring into me, the feeling of his hands rubbing on mine, of his body, and I want to throw up, I want to give up…