At my house, you spoke six languages fluently or you didn’t speak at all. That was the law. Not written on paper, but taped to every wall and inside every breath. Monday was French, Tuesday German, Wednesday Mandarin, Thursday Arabic, Friday Russian, Saturday Japanese. Sunday was “review,” which meant switching between all of them until your head rang. English—our only native tongue—was contraband.

My parents didn’t speak anything except English. That was the punchline and the wound. They were obsessed with videos of polyglots code-switching on YouTube, TED Talks about neuroplasticity, podcasts about geniuses raised on five languages before kindergarten. My mother watched people glide between vocabularies and cried like she’d missed the bus to the life she deserved. My father got drunk and said if he’d learned languages as a kid he’d be somebody important instead of clocking in at the warehouse. So when my sister Louise was born, they invented a family religion: salvation by fluency.

The first time I mixed up Monday-French with Tuesday-German, I was eight. I said a French word in a Spanish sentence we were trying out on a Sunday, and my mother slapped me so hard I fell out of my chair. My cheek burned. The bowl of cereal slid sideways and spilled like I’d tipped the world. “Focus,” my father snapped. “You’re lucky we’re saving you from being small.”

We had tutors for every day of the week. They sat at our dining room table with their tote bags full of flashcards and textbooks, and my parents hovered in the doorway watching for signs of genius like hawks waiting for a rabbit. Wyatt, my little brother, was eleven and already having panic attacks. He would sit with his hands under his thighs to keep them from shaking while the Mandarin tutor asked him to repeat tones he heard as cliffs he kept falling off.

Every mistake was a crime. If you slipped into English, dinner disappeared. If you mixed a Russian case inside a German sentence, you got locked in your room with nothing but a grammar workbook and a glass of water. Sometimes my mother made us write lines until our fingers cramped: I will not dishonor my family’s expectations in every language we were studying that day. She printed out certificates that said OUR BILINGUAL SUPERSTARS and mailed them to distant relatives who wrote back with thumbs-up emojis and questions about whether we were headed to Harvard already.

By thirteen, I was studying four hours a day after regular school. My grades in math and science nosedived because I had nothing left. On my thirteenth birthday, my parents sat me at the kitchen table and slid a glossy brochure between the cereal bowls. A stone-looking campus in Europe. Kids in uniforms. A line about “no family contact for the first year to maximize immersion.”

“You have two years to be fluent in all six,” my father said, tapping the brochure. “Or you go here. We’ve been in touch. They’re expecting you.”

I nodded and felt my stomach turn to ice. I didn’t cry. Crying made things worse. Wyatt started having nightmares about tutors who stood over him while he slept, whispering verb conjugations into his ears.

One Wednesday afternoon, during my Mandarin hour, something in me broke and curved at the same time. The tutor asked a question. I built a sound that felt like Mandarin but wasn’t—words made of syllables in the right order but meaning nothing. He frowned. I nodded with authority I borrowed from adults. “Regional dialect,” I said in English for the tiniest second, then corrected myself in fake-Mandarin, waving my hand like this was all beneath me.

My parents didn’t speak Mandarin. They loved the idea of it. They couldn’t hear the difference. I told them the tutor wasn’t qualified to evaluate my progress in the dialects I had, through independent study, mastered. For two weeks, I got away with a language that belonged only to me and meant exactly nothing. Wyatt caught on and invented a German that sounded like hail. We slept. Our shoulders dropped. We breathed.

Then my parents brought in experts. Real linguistics professors from the university. They recognized our nonsense immediately, and the shame that spread across my parents’ faces felt like weather changing. My father threw our language books one by one, hard enough that corners left bruises. My mother cried about being made to look like fools. We were grounded for two months, double tutors, mornings before school, evenings after, weekends swallowed whole.

I lasted until my eyes burned and words blurred. Then I went to my school counselor and showed her the bruise on my shoulder where a Russian textbook had hit. She called CPS the same day. Wyatt and I were removed that afternoon, and for two months we lived with a foster mom in a house where English was allowed and no one asked us to prove we deserved dinner by declining adjectives.

In foster care, the absence of pressure felt obscene. We watched television shows and laughed at jokes and argued about which cereal was best. I said cool and okay and whatever without translating them first, and cried alone in the bathroom because relief is its own kind of grief. Wyatt began sleeping through the night. His hands stopped shaking.

Then our parents showed up at family court with a lawyer and all six tutors lined up like a choir. The tutors testified we were making great progress. The professors said multilingual education can benefit children provided it’s structured, and while our parents were strict, our brains were blooming. Louise took the stand and smiled at the judge the way she smiles at cameras. She said she was grateful for an upbringing that made her exceptional and that we were lazy, lying, or both.

The judge sent us home with a lecture about cultural enrichment and parental authority. That night, my father sat us at the kitchen table and said, in careful English for the last time, “From now on there is no English in this house. You speak the six languages, or you don’t speak at all.” He pushed back his chair and left. The silence that remained buzzed like electricity in the walls.

We woke to schedules taped to every surface. Kitchen cabinet. Bathroom mirror. Inside the pantry. The hallway. The back of the front door. MON: FR, TUE: DE, WED: ZH, THU: AR, FRI: RU, SAT: JA, SUN: REVIEW. At breakfast, my mother spoke in textbook French with the edge of a drill sergeant. I forced my brain into a shape it didn’t fit and answered in French too, the words like rocks I had to carry across the room in both hands.

At school, homeroom felt like church. English rose around me and I almost cried in the safety of it. But by Tuesday night German had eaten the edges of my thoughts and I fell asleep over verb charts. My mother shook me awake and said, in German, that sleeping is for people who don’t want a future. She stood at my shoulder while I finished every problem. I crawled into bed at midnight and woke up three hours later for more.

On Wednesday, after everyone was asleep, I crept into the hallway and slid a piece of notebook paper into the small front pocket of Wyatt’s backpack. I wrote in English, tiny block letters: We’ll get through this together. Seeing those words I chose—it felt like oxygen. Thursday was Arabic. Wyatt found the note at the table and looked at me with eyes that said a thousand things. He nodded so small only I could see it and went back to conjugating. For the next twenty minutes, everything else was bearable.

By Friday, I was dizzy from lack of sleep. Mrs. Sutherland, my school counselor, found me leaning against a locker and asked if everything was okay. I wanted to tell her about the schedules that had colonized our house and the way my mother’s mouth moved when she was about to hit, but I saw a courtroom. I saw the judge. I saw a return flight to the kitchen table. “Trouble sleeping,” I said. She nodded the way adults do when they know you’re not telling them everything and said her door was open.

Sunday was review day, all six languages colliding. My father asked me a question in French. I started to answer then turned to Wyatt and whispered in English, “I can’t remember the word for…” It was the quietest whisper. It ricocheted like a gunshot. My father stood so fast his chair slammed the floor and he reached for the thick Russian textbook. The corner hit my shoulder. Pain bit down. I fell and bit my lip so hard I tasted metal because crying made him angrier. He yelled at me in English about the no-English rule and the absurdity of that would have been funny if I hadn’t been so scared. My mother started yelling too. Wyatt pressed himself into the back of his chair like he could disappear into wood.

Upstairs, I looked at the bloom of bruise across my shoulder and something inside me shifted into a new gear. I didn’t have a plan. I had an engine.

The next day at lunch, I went to the library and opened my science textbook. In the pocket inside the front cover, I slid a page I’d written in English: Dad threw a book at me last night and it left a bruise on my shoulder. I wrote down the date. I wrote about the no-English rule and falling asleep over homework and being forced to finish problems while my mother watched the clock. I folded the paper and slid it into the pocket, then breathed like I’d been underwater and found a place my hand could reach.

That week, Wyatt’s Mandarin tutor, Isabella, came on Wednesday. Ten minutes before she arrived, I heard Wyatt in the bathroom breathing too fast, gulping air like a fish. I sat on the tile beside him and whispered in English, “In for four, out for four,” the way the foster mom had taught us. My count moved his breath into a rhythm that didn’t hurt. His face was red, his hands shook, and the doorbell rang. “Just this lesson,” I whispered. “Then we figure the rest out.”

At the dining table, Isabella spoke in careful Mandarin and kept glancing at Wyatt’s shaking hands. She also kept glancing at my parents standing in the doorway like monitors. She shortened the lesson. She scribbled something in her notebook that wasn’t vocabulary. I watched her eyes: concerned, assessing, then afraid. Adults either look away or they don’t. It’s hard to tell which kind you’ve got until the house is already burning.

That weekend, my father discovered our router’s admin page and found the device logs. Every website. Every timestamp. “From now on,” he said, “we check these every night. Phones on the table at nine. No more distractions.” He smiled like a man proud of building a fence. The house got smaller in the way prisons do.

On Monday, Isabella taught me Mandarin. I wore a short-sleeve shirt because it was warm out and the bruise on my shoulder had turned the color of rotting pears. She stared at it for a beat too long and swallowed. My parents stepped away to check on dinner. Isabella leaned forward and whispered, in English, “Are you okay?” Her voice was so gentle I almost cried right there. I shook my head once, small enough that it could have been a flinch. She touched the back of my hand with one finger, then switched back to Mandarin in the same breath when my parents returned. The touch burned and healed at the same time.

At school the next day, I created a new email from a library computer under a fake name and wrote to Mrs. Sutherland’s school address: Things at home have gotten worse. Can we talk privately? She replied within a day. Thursday, study hall. Her room. Door closed. She promised confidentiality. I carried that promise like a talisman.

Before I could make it to Thursday, my father asked for my phone at breakfast. I had forgotten to delete a draft of my email. He scrolled. He grunted. “Stay focused on languages,” he said, handing it back. I deleted everything and my hands shook so hard I almost dropped the phone into the sink.

When I sat in Mrs. Sutherland’s office, I rolled up my sleeves and showed her the bruises. She didn’t try to soften her face. She didn’t say, “Are you sure?” like disbelief was the right kind of polite. She asked if she could take photos. She did, carefully, with a hand that shook only when she thought I wasn’t looking. I told her about the no-English rule, the thrown books, the hours and hours and hours. She listened like it was her job to catch what I set down. Before I left, she pulled a lost-and-found MP3 recorder from her desk, showed me how to turn it on, and tucked it into my palm. “If you can record anything, it helps,” she said. “Only if it’s safe.”

That weekend, my father announced an “immersion weekend.” A tutor would stay in our house overnight to make sure we didn’t cheat, and we would sleep in shifts to maximize our learning. He said it like a man unveiling a new product line. The tutor arrived Saturday at nine with a small suitcase and a stack of lesson plans. By three o’clock my brain was cotton. My father yelled at Wyatt for using the wrong word on the wrong day and something crashed. Mr. Park from next door knocked to ask if everything was okay. My father smiled with all his teeth and said we were doing “an exciting educational challenge.” Mr. Park nodded, apologized for interrupting, and asked us to keep it down. My brief, stupid hope that a grown-up might call someone died like a spark in rain.

By Monday, I felt like a ghost inside a body wearing my clothes. I posted an anonymous paragraph on a teen support forum describing a “rigid language schedule” and punishments and asking if it was normal. People I would never meet wrote back: That’s abuse. You’re not crazy. Please tell a trusted adult. The words rearranged something inside me.

Wednesday afternoon, Isabella arrived again. Halfway through my lesson, my mother stepped into the kitchen to take a call. Isabella tore a sliver from her notebook and wrote a number. She slid it across the table and whispered in Mandarin, “If you ever need help.” I folded the paper into my fist and tucked it under the insole of my shoe.

Thursday morning, the MP3 recorder slipped out of my hoodie pocket and hit the tile. My father stopped stirring his coffee. He bent, picked up the little black rectangle, and pressed play. His own voice roared out, insulting and large. The device hit the counter and shattered. Plastic skittered across the floor. He called me a traitor and a spy. My mother cried about betrayal, about everything they had given me. I said nothing. They took my phone. They went through it in the living room. They didn’t find the cloud backup or the school Chromebook microphone I’d learned to use for “history projects.” That night, I lay in bed and remembered the progress bar filling with what I had managed to save. Hope looked like a blue line crawling across a screen.

I became methodical. Recordings at school. Timestamps. A spreadsheet in a folder labeled World History. During lunch, I sat in the library and built a timeline. I learned to hold a ruler up next to a dent in the wall and put both in frame so a stranger could measure impact in inches. When my parents live-streamed a “language showcase” for relatives on Sunday and my mother slapped me in the break for using a French word during Spanish, I saw the red print on my cheek in the webcam preview and swallowed bile. A girl from the support forum messaged me later with screenshots she had captured from the stream: my mother’s hand raised, my face turned, then the welt. Proof I hadn’t even planned found me.

On Monday, Wyatt told me in a whisper he wanted to run away. “Anywhere,” he said, eyes red, hands trembling. “I’ll sleep under the bleachers at school. I can’t do this.” I pulled him into the bathroom and locked the door and showed him the screenshot of my cheek, the audio files in my cloud, the email from a child-advocacy attorney Mrs. Sutherland had connected me with. “Two more weeks,” I said. “If it doesn’t work, we figure something else out. Together.” He nodded because I needed him to.

The forensic-interview appointment went on the calendar like a north star. Before it came, my parents announced we were withdrawing from school to homeschool. “Public school interferes with your language education,” my father said. “This way we can monitor progress.” The smell of fear came off me like sweat. They were cutting off mandated reporters. They were closing the doors.

Homeschool meant tutors from eight in the morning to eight at night, my parents sitting in the room pretending to monitor quality while monitoring us. Bathroom breaks timed. Earbuds loaded with language lessons to wear during any “down time.” I hid my phone in my pillowcase and crept into the backyard at two a.m., barefoot on cold grass. The neighbor’s Wi‑Fi had no password. I emailed Mrs. Sutherland and the attorney: They pulled us from school. No access. Constant supervision. I attached the screenshots. I deleted my history. A light came on upstairs. I slipped back into bed with my heart thudding like a door someone was trying to break down.

On Thursday of week eight, a car pulled into our driveway during my Russian lesson. My mother’s voice went high and sugar-sweet. Two police officers walked in behind the CPS caseworker. The house’s gravity shifted. My father tried to object to the caseworker speaking to us alone, and one of the officers took a step forward and he shut his mouth like it hurt. In the kitchen, Wyatt cried, not quiet but body-shaking. He told the caseworker about the nightmares and the panic attacks and the fear. She wrote everything down, recommended an immediate medical evaluation, and gave my parents a deadline they couldn’t ignore.

The pediatrician documented “elevated anxiety consistent with chronic stress” and recommended therapy. It wasn’t handcuffs. It was a sentence written in a medical chart that lawyers read. The child-advocacy center scheduled forensic interviews. In a room with soft lighting and toys too young for me, I told a stranger everything. I named the days and the punishments. I showed photos of bruises. I played the recording where my father threatened to send us to a boarding school with no contact for a year. The interviewer didn’t flinch. She took the flash drive and said, “Thank you for telling me.” Sometimes kindness sounds like a door unlocking.

Two days later, Isabella submitted an affidavit to CPS. She described Wyatt’s panic attacks during lessons, the visible injuries, the pressure in the room when my parents stood in the doorway pretending they could understand what she was teaching. She wrote about fear she saw settle on us like dust.

At the emergency hearing, the judge listened to audio through headphones and read affidavits and stared at the evidence like it was a map to where we lived. She ordered a safety plan: immediate re-enrollment in school, mandatory parenting classes twice a week, unannounced home visits, therapy for both kids, and a hard cap of one hour total of language study per day. “Any violation,” she said, looking directly at my father, “and the children will be removed.” It wasn’t the victory montage I’d fantasized about. It was a line drawn on the floor.

That night, I downloaded a safety-app the caseworker had mentioned—two taps to send my location to dispatch. The icon sat on my screen like a lighthouse. I showed Wyatt. His eyes went wide. Relief moved across his face like the first warm day after months of snow.

On Saturday morning during Wyatt’s Mandarin hour, I heard my father’s voice slide into the tone that meant the cliff was coming. I opened the app. He threw the textbook. Wyatt yelped. I hit the button. The message sent: help, here. I stepped between them and said, “I called the police.” My father went pale. He began assembling sentences that sounded like accidents. The tutor packed her bag and left quickly. The officers photographed the red mark on Wyatt’s shoulder and wrote down the tutor’s name. “This violates the safety plan,” one said. “The judge will be notified.” My father’s jaw clenched and unclenched like a man chewing nails.

By Monday morning, Wyatt and I were back at our regular school. Mrs. Sutherland handed me a 504 plan—extra time on tests, passes for breaks, permission to come to her office when the cafeteria got too loud. I walked the hallway and listened to English rustle around me like leaves. In English class, my teacher returned an essay with a B‑ minus and I didn’t spiral into panic; I highlighted two lines and made a note to ask a question. At lunch, kids talked about normal things and I answered in whatever language I wanted. My eyes stung and I let them. The normalcy felt like mercy.

Two days later, Wyatt had a panic attack in the cafeteria and I coached him through the grounding exercise my therapist taught me—five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste—while the nurse fetched a paper bag. Kids stared, but some texted me later to say they were sorry he was having a hard day and did I need notes for science. Witnesses can be the difference between drowning and being pulled back to shore.

That Friday, the caseworker pulled us from class to say she was recommending removal. “Your parents violated the plan,” she said softly. “We believe you’ll be safer in care while they complete services.” I felt guilt and relief hit at the same time. It’s a strange thing to want two opposite truths and call both of them home.

The following Monday, a social worker picked us up with our clothes in garbage bags and drove us to the same foster mom’s house as before. Dinner was spaghetti, and the only test was whether you wanted garlic bread. We watched a sitcom where no one spoke Russian unless the joke required it. I lay in bed that night and listened to quiet like it was a song I hadn’t heard since I was small. I slept without anyone timing my breath.

Two weeks later, we sat in court again. The judge extended our foster placement for at least six months and ordered parenting classes and anger-management counseling before even supervised visits could happen. My mother cried the specific tears of a person who doesn’t understand why the hammer fell. My father stared at the table and flexed his hands. Louise glared at me like I’d stolen something that belonged to her. I looked back and didn’t look away.

Supervised visits started in a cinderblock building downtown with murals of trees painted on the walls to make it look less like what it was. A woman named Mrs. Avery sat at a desk in the corner with a clipboard and the kind of calm people borrow from professionalism. My parents sat across from us at a plastic table and asked how school was going, like we were interviewing for positions in their family. Wyatt said his math teacher was nice. I said English class was my favorite, which made my mother flinch like I’d pinched her.

After the visit, my phone buzzed with a long text from Louise, paragraphs about how languages are beautiful and maybe Mom and Dad just loved us wrong but loved us so much, and how she turned out fine because she chose to be grateful. I saved it and didn’t respond. There are conversations you can’t have until the person on the other end recognizes what the words mean.

At the foster house, I did homework at the kitchen table while the foster mom stirred a pot of chili. “You can pick a language elective if you want one next semester,” she said, like offering dessert. I signed up for Spanish because I wanted to see what learning looked like when it wasn’t a weapon. The teacher sang us songs and taught us about festivals. When I messed up a verb, she smiled and corrected me and asked the next kid for an answer. I could feel the difference in my bones: the good kind of effort leaves you tired and proud. The bad kind leaves you small.

Wyatt started sleeping through most nights. Loud noises still made him jump, but the panic didn’t chew through the day the way it used to. His therapist gave him tools and celebrated tiny wins—a full week without a nightmare, raising his hand in class. Healing looked like a messy line trending upward.

On a Wednesday night, I opened the support forum where I’d first asked if our life was normal and wrote the whole story, anonymized but true. It took an hour. When I hit submit, responses came like hands on my back helping me stand. People believed me. A stranger said, “This is abuse,” and I didn’t have to make the case.

Month by month, the case moved the way family-court cases move: slow and then all at once. My parents completed parenting classes and anger-management sessions that they described as “stupid hoops,” and the judge extended our placement anyway, citing “failure to demonstrate sustained change.” The caseworker explained it like a weather report: patterns, not moments, determine the forecast.

At a visit in late spring, my father tried to ask in French if we were keeping up with languages. Mrs. Avery cleared her throat, and he switched to English. My mother kept her hands folded and asked if we needed anything. I said I needed a new binder. She blinked, confused, then wrote it down like maybe buying me office supplies could unlock a door.

I built a life in the space that opened: school, therapy, Saturday mornings that belonged to pancakes and cartoons instead of earbud lessons on loop. The Spanish teacher recommended a cultural night downtown, and the foster mom drove me and three classmates. We watched a dance troupe twirl skirts the color of fruit and ate churros dusted with sugar that stuck to our fingers. No one tested us afterward. We just lived through it and called it good.

On the anniversary of the first CPS call, the attorney called with news. “The judge will consider guardianship with your foster mom if your parents don’t show significant progress by summer,” she said. “You and Wyatt will each have a chance to speak to the court again.” I wrote down the date on an index card and taped it inside my notebook where once there would have been verb charts.

Spanish class became the safest hour of my week. Señora Diaz asked about our lives in a mix of English and Spanish, modeling how bilingual people actually talk in American classrooms. “Spanglish is a bridge,” she said, playful and fierce at the same time. “Use what you’ve got to get where you’re going.” I started a side project—paintings of what Spanish sounded like to me: saffron yellows, terracotta swirls, turquoise lines. Señora asked if she could hang one on the classroom wall. I wrote a tiny note in the corner: Sound, seen.

The second set of supervised visits were quieter. My parents brought snacks you didn’t have to earn. They asked about Wyatt’s video game and actually listened when he told them about it. They told Mrs. Avery they wanted to do better. She nodded, wrote more notes.

At school, a girl named Brianna from my English class asked if I wanted to join the spoken-word club. I said no and then changed my mind because I was tired of living behind no. The first night, I watched other kids stand up and tell the truth into a microphone. When it was my turn, I read a piece about kitchen tables and schedules and a house where silence had an accent. I didn’t use the word abuse. I didn’t have to. Afterward, a boy with chipped nail polish said, “That was brave.” I didn’t feel brave. I felt accurate.

The night before the summer hearing, I slept badly and woke early. The courthouse smelled like lemon cleaner and old paper. The judge listened to updates like she was assembling a clock and needed every gear to fit. The caseworker detailed compliance and noncompliance. The therapist reported progress and trigger points. Wyatt spoke in a voice I barely recognized—steady. He talked about panic and sleep and how school felt like a place he could breathe. I told the judge I wanted to keep living where the language of our house didn’t change with the day of the week.

The judge granted another six months out of home with a review in the fall, citing “ongoing concerns regarding parental insight.” It sounded cold. It felt like an arm around our shoulders.

After court, we ate grilled cheese at a diner where the waitress called me sweetie and didn’t care what languages I spoke. The foster mom told a story about forgetting her lines in a high school play and we laughed until my sides hurt. We drove home with the windows down. The world had so much English in it it felt like light.

Summer tasted like freedom scaled to budget: public pool afternoons, a library card that meant I could walk out with a stack of books as high as my chest, Dollar Tree popsicles that stained our tongues red. Wyatt and I biked to the park and lay on our backs in the grass narrating cloud shapes in whatever language we felt like, then translating for each other just because we could.

In July, I got my first job bagging groceries at the corner market. The manager showed me how to smile with my eyes when people were rude. I learned the rhythm of the receipt printer, the soft pings of the register. At the end of my shift, I rode home with ten dollars in tips and the easiest kind of exhaustion, the kind you sleep off.

At Spanish night school, Señora brought in a musician with a jarana and we learned a simple song. I sang quietly and watched saffron shapes rise and float and thought about how color used to mean pressure and now it just meant color. After class, I sat on the curb outside and said, in English because I wanted to, “I like learning Spanish.” I said it again in Spanish because I could. Both felt honest.

Fall came, and with it, another court date. My parents had completed their programs on paper, but the caseworker’s notes were full of phrases like “minimizes concerns” and “externalizes blame.” The judge looked tired. She extended our placement again and modified visits to therapeutic ones with a family therapist in the room. “Relationships can be rebuilt,” she said. “But not at the expense of safety.”

Therapeutic visits were a different terrain. The therapist, Dr. Hall, asked questions my parents couldn’t deflect: “What do you think your children felt when you…?” “How did you decide that consequence was appropriate?” She paused after each answer long enough for discomfort to do its work. My mother cried in a way that didn’t buy her anything. My father said, “I thought I was making them strong,” and Dr. Hall said, “You were making them small,” in the gentlest voice. He didn’t argue.

Between sessions, life kept happening. Wyatt made the basketball team as a bench player and celebrated like he’d been drafted. I got an A on a research paper about bilingual education models that recognize students as whole people and handed it to Señora with a grin. At Thanksgiving, my foster mom let me bake a pie from a recipe I found online, and it came out lopsided and perfect.

A week before Christmas, a letter arrived from Isabella on school stationery. She wrote that she was leaving private tutoring for a public-school job and that working with us had changed how she understood the line between challenge and harm. She said she wanted us to know she thought we were brave. I pressed the paper flat on my desk and traced the loops of her signature.

In January, a snowstorm iced the city and closed school for two days. The foster mom made cocoa and we watched movies in fleece socks. Wyatt and I built a Jenga tower on the coffee table and argued the way normal siblings do about whether his move counted. I took a picture of the tower with my leftover flip phone because I wanted proof ordinary existed.

At the spring review, the judge said words I hadn’t let myself imagine in my own mouth: long-term guardianship with our foster mom, supervision of any contact with our parents, case closed if stability continued through summer. She looked at me and said, “You’ve done a remarkable job advocating for yourself and your brother.” I said, “Thank you, Your Honor,” and didn’t cry until I was in the hallway.

That night, I stood on our small back stoop in the soft dark and listened. The refrigerator hummed. The furnace clicked on. Somewhere far off, a train laid a low blue line across the night. No voices rose behind me in the wrong language. No footsteps approached with a book in hand. I said my name out loud and watched it turn into color I understood.

A year after we left for the second time, I sat in the auditorium for awards night. They called my name for an essay prize and Wyatt’s for a citizenship award the principal said belonged to a kid who lifts others. He flushed bright and tried to hide in his hoodie. Afterward we walked to the parking lot under a sky that looked like chalk dust and the foster mom said, “Ice cream?” We said yes because we could.

On the last day of school, I carried home a cardboard box of Spanish posters Señora was retiring and taped my favorite one above my desk. It said, in big black letters: EL IDIOMA ES UNA CASA. Language is a house. I stared at it for a long time. Then I wrote, on a notecard I slid onto the frame: I decide who lives here.

The future came in small packages: a part-time job at the clinic front desk, plans to apply to a state college with a scholarship for students interested in social work, a spot in a summer art show where I hung three canvases titled After: French, After: Mandarin, After: Everything Else. People stood in front of them and tilted their heads and asked questions that didn’t make me feel like an exhibit. A woman said, “It sounds like you survived something,” and I said, “I did.”

If you want the practical answer, here it is: we broke the cycle because a counselor believed us, because a tutor told the truth, because a caseworker did the paperwork, because a judge drew a line and kept drawing it. If you want the better answer: we built a life where language is invitation instead of threat, where English is not contraband, where Spanish tastes like cinnamon sugar and laughter, where my brother sleeps almost every night and wakes up hungry, not terrified.

Sometimes I still wake at two a.m. and listen for footsteps. I breathe in for four and out for four and name what I can see in the dark: the outline of the dresser, the shadow of the chair, the soft blue blink of the router. I touch the edge of the blanket. I hear the slow heat knock in the pipes. I smell the laundry soap. I taste the mint I sucked when I brushed my teeth. Then I roll over and sleep because I can.

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, I sat on the front steps with Wyatt and ate popsicles that turned our tongues red. A delivery truck rumbled by, a neighbor mowed a lawn, a kid tested a trumpet two doors down and missed half his notes. The sound made orange ripples in the air, and I laughed because imperfection looked like freedom. Wyatt asked what was funny and I said, “Everything,” and he nudged my shoulder with his.

“Do you ever miss it?” he asked, not looking at me.

“The languages?” I said. “Not the rules.”

He nodded. “Me neither.”

We sat there and watched the world talk to itself in whatever language it wanted. The evening stretched in front of us like a road we didn’t have to translate. I licked the last of the red off my popsicle and stood up. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go get garlic bread.”

We walked inside speaking English, then Spanish for practice, then silence, and none of it hurt. That was the ending I wanted. Not a slam of a door, but a house where any door could open without a test.

Language is a house. Ours has windows that let the light in and a table where no one times your answers. There are books, and there is laughter, and there is the space between, where a person becomes themselves. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s ours.