At my house, your life was an assignment.

My mother made them the day we were born, like she was handing out hospital bracelets that never came off. Natalie was the smart one. Eden was the pretty one. Miles was the strong one. I was the dumb one. She wrote those words in the box on our birth certificates meant for “medical notes,” as if opinions were diagnoses.

Dad left when he realized she wasn’t joking. He packed a bag and stood by the door with the look of a man who had just seen the future and wanted no part of it. “You’re going to hurt them,” he said. Mom smiled the tight smile she saved for people who doubted her systems. “I’m going to optimize them,” she said. The door closed behind him and the house grew quiet in a way that wasn’t peace.

Mom called it the family ecosystem. “Every species has a role,” she’d say, tapping the white board she hung over the kitchen table. “Balance is everything.” Balance looked like punishment whenever a child drifted toward the wrong light. If Natalie stumbled over a math problem, I got slapped for trying to help, because dumb children didn’t do math. When I hit a growth spurt and stood taller than Eden, Mom pinned my shoulders with her hands and hissed, “Hunch.” I learned to fold myself down until my spine hurt. Miles wasn’t allowed to cry, even with a broken wrist from lifting the weights Mom kept stacked in the living room. The pretty one had to stay thin, so Eden’s food came in tiny measured portions and she fainted so often it felt like a hobby.

Mom yanked me out of school after third grade. “She can’t read,” she told the principal, who looked at me over her glasses as if I were already gone. Really, Mom had panicked when I started reading chapter books meant for fifth graders. She found a doctor willing to write a note about a severe learning disability I didn’t have, bought a seven-day pill organizer, and began handing me tablets that made my brain feel like it had been wrapped in fog. “You’ll be calmer,” she promised. “It’s for your own good.”

Natalie slid textbooks under my door after midnight and whispered definitions through the register. Eden palmed my pills and swapped them with vitamins when she could, her hands steady in the dark. Miles pretended to chase me away from his weights and then taught me how to squat without wrecking my knees. We made a secret language out of finger taps and looks: one tap for help, two for danger, three for wait. We learned how to survive the weather of Mom.

When I was fifteen, we tried to run. Miles had a mayonnaise jar full of crumpled cash he’d earned mowing lawns and hauling boxes. We got as far as the train station. Mom had slipped trackers into our phones; she walked up to us like a Sunday school teacher finding kids in the candy aisle. The punishment was creative in the way of cruelty. Miles carried hundred‑pound feed bags everywhere for a week until his back seized. Natalie solved equations for sixteen hours straight while Mom hovered with a stopwatch. Eden stood in front of a mirror listing her flaws until her voice went hoarse. I wrote I am too stupid to think for myself ten thousand times, pressing the pen so hard it dented the paper beneath.

After that, Mom moved us to an isolated farmhouse an hour from town and told the few friends she had left that we’d died in a fire. The mailbox at the end of the lane held grocery flyers and a PO Box key. The house smelled like bleach and lavender. Mom lined up the pill bottles on the counter like trophies.

Three years later, I found the back door of the world. The county library’s computer lab had a fifteen‑minute time limit if other people were waiting, and people were always waiting. I learned to click fast. I signed up for online courses under a fake name while Mom thought I was watching music videos. Natalie created academic emergencies that required Mom’s full attention. Eden staged beauty crises that took hours to fix. Miles pretended to sprain an ankle so she would hover with ice packs. In the quiet pockets they carved, I studied. I finished my GED the month I turned eighteen.

I applied to State University from a library terminal that ate my quarters every nine minutes. When the acceptance letter arrived at the PO Box—a thick envelope addressed to a name Mom didn’t know—Miles brought it to the barn like he was carrying a live bird. We crouched in the hay and opened it together. Then we cried the quiet cry of people who can’t afford to be heard.

We planned my escape like a heist. Natalie would fake a seizure from the strain of overtaxing her brilliant mind. Eden would smash a mirror and threaten to ruin her face. During the chaos, Miles would load my duffel under the tarp of his pickup and drive. We rehearsed with the lights off, whispering contingencies like prayers.

It worked. We pulled out before dawn, the truck rattling over the washboard road. I didn’t breathe until the first green sign for the highway. Campus rose out of the heat like a promise. For one week I lived in a dorm and went to class and picked my own clothes. I answered a question in Intro to Psych and the professor said “Exactly,” and it only meant I was right. I bought a used copy of a novel from a thrift bin and underlined sentences just because I liked them. I made friends who knew me as Laya, not as a role in a system.

On Friday afternoon, my phone rang while I was balancing a pizza box on my hip and trying to open my dorm room door with my elbow.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” Mom’s voice was unnervingly calm. “The school called about your medical records. I’ve already withdrawn you. Miles is bringing you home.”

I turned. Miles stood in the doorway, eyes red, jaw clenched, guilt pouring off him like heat. Behind him, Mom held a black medical bag. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “She—she said she’d blind Eden. She said she’d break Natalie’s hands.”

Mom unzipped the bag and pulled out a syringe. “You’ve upset the whole ecosystem,” she said, walking toward me with the smile veterinarians use on frightened animals. “We need to quiet that overactive brain permanently. Dr. Benson will meet us at the house. He specializes in discreet lobotomies—little adjustments for problem children.”

Miles grabbed my arms. The needle glinted. My heart hammered so hard my vision pulsed. The metal touched my skin—

The banging on the door shook the frame.

Campus security officer Kia Nash came through first, hand on her radio, eyes flicking from Miles’s grip to my face to the medical bag on the desk. “Hands off her,” she said, stepping between us. Her voice had the kind of calm that makes people obey.

“I’m her mother,” Mom said, switching to her doctor voice. “She’s unwell. I’m worried she’ll hurt herself. We have medication—”

“What’s in the bag?” Nash asked.

“Syringe,” I managed between clacking teeth. “She tried to inject me.”

Nash’s gaze dropped to the faint red dot blooming on my forearm. She keyed her radio. “Need backup to Oak Hall, Room 312. Possible assault with syringe.” She positioned herself in the doorway, one arm out. “No one leaves.”

Mom tried to push past her. Nash lifted a hand without touching her and Mom stopped as if she’d run into glass.

Two more guards arrived. Nash split the room like a trained surgeon—guards with Mom and Miles, Nash with me. She guided me into the hall and kept her body between mine and theirs like a shield. My whole body shook so hard I thought I might rattle apart. “You’re safe,” she said. “Breathe with me.”

The ambulance came in what felt like a year and was probably ten minutes. The EMTs documented the injection mark, noted the fading finger marks on my arms where Miles had held me, and loaded me onto the gurney. As the doors closed, I saw Nash through the window, standing square in the hallway while Mom talked and talked and the guards didn’t move.

At the emergency room, Dr. Leora Kamura examined my arm and took photographs with a small camera that flashed like lightning. She ordered blood work, hair samples, a urine test, swabs from my mouth—“We’re going to see what’s in your system,” she said, gentle, efficient, furious in a way that made me feel believed. When I told her about the pills, about the years of fog Mom had called treatment, Dr. Kamura’s mouth tightened. She ordered a brain scan and more tests “to rule out damage we can treat.”

I spent the night under fluorescent lights, listening to the beeps and the low voices at the nurses’ station. In the morning, a woman with a neat bun and a thick folder introduced herself as Leandra McGuire from the university case management office.

“We flagged irregularities in your record,” she said, sliding into the chair by my bed. “The registrar’s office received withdrawal forms stating you have profound cognitive impairment. The forms were signed by your mother. You’ve been attending classes and doing fine, so we’re reversing the withdrawal and entering a FERPA block—Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. It means no one gets your records without your written consent. No one.”

The word no one landed like a warm blanket. Leandra and I spent an hour filling out forms. She started the paperwork for a campus no‑contact order. “It’ll take a few days,” she said. “But campus police already have your mother’s photo, and Oak Hall has an extra patrol.”

I texted our old code—three emojis in a sequence only we knew—to my siblings. Are you okay? Eden responded first: Mom’s home. Screaming. Calling lawyers. Trying to get guardianship over you. Be careful.

Leandra dialed legal aid from her phone. An attorney named Lana Felt arrived twenty minutes later with a legal pad and a face made for bad news. “We need to document everything,” she said, uncapping her pen. “Start at the beginning.”

So I did. I told her about the roles written like diagnoses, about the punishments for competence, about the farmhouse, the pills, the first escape, the second. Lana’s pen raced. “We’ll oppose guardianship. We’ll seek a temporary restraining order,” she said. “Save every text, every voicemail, every email. Don’t respond. Forward everything to me.”

Detective Lucinda Bridges from City PD came that afternoon to take my statement about the dorm incident. She set a small recorder on the bedside table and nodded for me to start. I described the syringe, the words Mom had used—“lobotomy,” “scoop out the problem areas”—and the way Miles’s hands had felt on my arms. When I mentioned the birth certificates, Detective Bridges’s eyebrows went up. “She wrote the roles on the medical-notes line?” she asked. “We’ll pull the county record.”

I spent the next two days gathering proof. I had hidden my GED certificate in a Ziploc bag under a loose board in the barn; Miles knew where. He scanned it and emailed it from a library computer. I printed my acceptance letter again. I scrolled back through years of messages from my siblings describing what Mom had done to them and forwarded everything to Lana. In the hospital cafeteria, Lana sorted the papers into neat stacks labeled EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCE, PATTERN OF ABUSE, MEDICAL EVIDENCE. She shook her head at Eden’s texts about forced fasting, at Natalie’s about pretending not to understand basic concepts.

The financial‑aid office froze my aid the same afternoon Mom called them to say I was incompetent to manage money. Leandra met me there the next morning. We sat in hard chairs while she walked the director through a dependency override, laying a copy of the police report on the desk like a trump card. “We’ll expedite,” the director said, eyes wide.

Mom started emailing me. Paragraphs poured into my inbox about the ecosystem, how the dumb one kept the smart one from floating off into useless abstraction, how Eden’s beauty meant nothing without contrast, how Miles’s strength grew from protecting the weak. Lana told me to save every word and never reply. “This is gold,” she said. “It shows exactly what we’re up against.”

Three days later, Dr. Kamura called with the first test results. “Your blood work shows sedatives consistent with long‑term exposure,” she said carefully. “Hair follicle analysis can show a timeline that goes back months, even years. We’re running it now. Laya, this is not treatment. This is harm.”

That evening, Miles called, sobbing so hard the words blurred. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry. She said I had to bring you back or she’d—she’d hurt them. She hired some guy who finds people. He’s tracking your phone.” In the background I heard Mom’s voice: “The strong one does not cry over discipline.”

Detective Bridges scheduled a meeting to file for a temporary restraining order. We sat in a beige room at the precinct while I filled out forms describing every threat I could remember. At the hearing three days later, Mom arrived in a navy suit, hair pulled tight, voice reasonable. “My daughter has delusions,” she told the judge. “She’s always needed supervision.” The judge read the emails about the ecosystem, studied the photos of the marks on my arms, scanned Dr. Kamura’s report, and granted the TRO on the spot. He set a hearing for a permanent order and warned Mom that any contact would lead to arrest.

She pivoted to the back door—cousins I hadn’t heard from in years called the dorm phone, family friends left voicemails about breaking a mother’s heart. Lana documented every contact as a violation of the spirit, if not yet the letter, of the order.

The next morning, someone posted my dorm address on a forum for “parents of troubled kids.” The post called me a dangerous, mentally ill runaway. Campus IT captured screenshots and traced IPs. Security increased patrols and started checking IDs at my building. The university issued a no‑trespass order; Officer Nash drove to the farmhouse and served it herself.

Two days later, a small padded envelope turned up in my campus mailbox. Inside, a thumb drive with a sticky note in Miles’s careful printing: evidence. I plugged it into my laptop and opened the first file.

There they were. Scanned copies of all four birth certificates. In the space where a nurse had once typed “healthy” and “full term,” my mother’s perfect cursive declared: NATALIE—SMART ONE (EXCEPTIONAL COGNITIVE FUNCTION). EDEN—PRETTY ONE (AESTHETIC PRIORITY). MILES—STRONG ONE (PHYSICAL DOMINANCE REQUIRED). LAYA—DUMB ONE (SEVERELY LIMITED CAPACITY).

I printed them and ran coatless to Lana’s office. She went white when she saw the pages. “Premeditated abuse from birth,” she said. “In twenty years, I’ve never seen it this clear.” She made copies for the file and set them on top like a crown.

That afternoon, a text in our old code arrived from Eden. She’d fainted. Mom had taken her to urgent care. The doctor had asked questions about eating. Mom had answered for her. “He looked suspicious,” Eden wrote. “But she was right there.” I told Eden to try to get copies of the records if she could. “Be careful,” I wrote. “I know,” she replied. “I’m so tired.”

The hair analysis came back two days later. Dr. Kamura’s voice carried the kind of anger reserved for the preventable. “The pattern shows sedatives for at least four years,” she said. “Doses increasing this past year. Laya, this isn’t a misunderstanding. This is poisoning.”

A letter arrived from Dr. Benson’s office that afternoon claiming they had “no record of scheduled procedures” for me and upholding their “commitment to appropriate medical ethics.” Lana circled phrases with a red pen—no formal consultations, no scheduled appointments—and wrote in the margin: careful denial.

Detective Bridges had me call the office while she recorded. I asked bland questions about “discreet house calls” and “private procedures for special family circumstances.” Dr. Benson came on the line himself. He didn’t admit anything about me, but he said, low and smooth, that his practice handled “difficult cases requiring discretion.” Bridges looked at me and nodded once. “That’s enough to yank his license and subpoena records,” she said.

The day after that, I found a folded note slid under my dorm door: Dumb girls who run away get hurt. The handwriting was Mom’s, even with the slant altered. Officer Nash collected the note and pulled hallway footage. Whoever delivered it knew the camera blind spots. Security tightened again. I started varying my routes to class.

The next morning, my backpack felt heavier than it should. I dumped everything onto my bed, then ran my fingers along the stitching at the bottom. A neat line of new thread. Inside, a small GPS tracker—hard plastic, expensive, warm from use. Detective Bridges bagged it and added stalking to the list.

By the end of the week, the registrar let me re‑enroll in two classes while the legal mess settled. Intro Psych and English Comp. The professors nodded gravely when Leandra explained, offered extensions for court dates, and told me to come to office hours if I needed to breathe.

Three weeks after the evaluation, the court denied Mom’s emergency guardianship petition. The evaluator’s report stated in clean lines that I was fully competent. That night, Natalie texted in code: Mom said if I testify she’ll make sure I never use my hands again. I forwarded the message to Lana and Detective Bridges, who looped in a social worker named Justina Wilkerson. “We’ll build exits,” Justina texted back on a secure app. “We won’t move until it’s safe.”

Two days later, my phone rang with Eden’s number and a wordless sob on the other end. “I ran,” she said finally. “I’m at a women’s shelter. They’re kind.” I sat on my dorm floor and cried with her while she talked about the way food tastes when no one is counting your bites. Within hours, Mom told police her pretty daughter had been kidnapped by her delusional sister. Detective Bridges confirmed with the shelter that Eden was an adult and safe and added “false report” to the growing stack of proof Mom couldn’t stop herself.

That was the week the past and the present collided on a campus sidewalk.

Across the green, a woman in a coat and sunglasses moved with a rhythm my bones recognized. No wig could change the way my mother’s anger lived in her calves. I texted Officer Nash and kept walking toward the security office. Mom angled across the lawn, hand in her bag. Nash intercepted her outside the library.

“I’m just checking on my daughter,” Mom said, voice sweetened with danger.

“You’re under a no‑trespass order,” Nash said, already calling it in. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

The handcuffs clicked. Mom shouted about parental rights while students slowed and stared. The scene felt impossible and completely real at the same time. For years, she had been the law in our house. Now the law had a name and a badge and stood between us.

Three weeks later, the courtroom filled with a kind of quiet that feels like pressure. The neighbor from near the farmhouse testified about the screaming she’d heard and the medical‑supply trucks that came too often. She told the judge about the afternoon she found me at fifteen, wandering in her side yard, dizzy from pills, and how my mother dragged me home by the elbow, saying I was “a special case prone to wandering.”

The judge’s face tightened as the evidence piled: the birth certificates with the roles written like conditions; Dr. Kamura’s lab results showing a four‑year timeline of sedatives; the GPS tracker; the note slid under my door; the doxing; the no‑trespass violation; the emails about ecosystems. He granted a three‑year restraining order with terms so strict they read like a cage around us—no direct or third‑party contact, no posts online, stay five hundred feet away from our bodies and our lives. Mom’s attorney called it excessive. The judge called it necessary.

Mom responded the way people like her always do: with another legal weapon. She filed a defamation suit demanding damages and a public retraction, calling me a liar burning down her reputation. Lana filed an anti‑SLAPP motion—Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. In a courtroom full of law students and a few reporters, the judge said the quiet part out loud: “This suit is a transparent attempt to silence the victim of abuse.” He tossed it and ordered Mom to pay our fees.

Detective Bridges finally got the search warrant. “We’re going in tomorrow,” she said on the phone. “Anything specific we should look for?”

“The metal filing cabinet in her bedroom,” I said. “Development charts. Notes about keeping us in our roles. A locked box under her bed with my pills.”

They found more than I imagined. Notebooks dating back to our births with daily entries: “Natalie too interested in drawing—remove supplies.” “Eden sweating during running—reduce calories.” “Miles cried—add weight to bar.” “Laya asked why—double dose.” Bottles of prescription sedatives with no patient names. Seventeen tracking devices shrink‑wrapped in neat stacks. Printed emails between Mom and Dr. Benson discussing “cognitive adjustment procedures for problem children,” and receipts for medical equipment no home should have.

The evidence‑room photos made my stomach clench—rows of syringes and vials and notebooks tagged and numbered under fluorescent light. Within hours, police arrested Mom at a motel off the interstate for assault, stalking, and child endangerment. The medical board suspended Dr. Benson’s license pending investigation after three other families came forward with stories about his “special cases.”

They questioned Miles about the night in my dorm. “We’re not pressing charges,” the detective told me afterward. “It’s clear he’s a victim, too.” Miles texted me a photo of his knee in a brace after urgent care. Mom had made him carry two hundred pounds up and down the stairs for hours; something tore. “Weird relief,” he wrote. “I can’t be her enforcer if I can’t walk.” Justina arranged a ride to a men’s shelter for the day he could bear to leave.

Mom posted bail three days later and began orbiting the edges of my life like a bad planet, standing exactly five hundred and one feet from the courthouse doors during hearings. Court officers measured and took photographs while she smiled and pretended she couldn’t count. “Every time she does it, it helps you,” Lana said. “She cannot respect a boundary.”

When the danger finally loosened its grip, the crash came. I jumped at footsteps behind me. My heart raced when a door clicked. At three a.m., I woke convinced I could smell the chemical tang of those pills. Leandra added my name to the trauma‑therapy waitlist; in the meantime, she connected me to an online group for family‑abuse survivors. It felt like a foreign language I already spoke: the way shame bends your voice; the math of deciding which truth to tell to which authority; the small, holy fact of being believed.

The prosecutor, Laurel Atkins, met with me and Lana to talk about a plea. “Trials are brutal,” she said. “This guarantees probation with strict conditions: mandatory psychiatric treatment, a long‑term no‑contact order for all four of you, immediate jail time for violations.” I called my siblings. Miles said he just wanted it over. Eden feared Mom would wriggle through any gap. Natalie thought maybe therapy could make a dent in whatever machine was running our mother. We decided safety mattered more than maximum punishment.

Mom pleaded guilty to assault and stalking. The judge looked at her over his glasses and made sure she understood that for ten years she could not call, text, email, post, appear, or send a cousin in her place. “If you so much as shadow their lives,” he said, “you will go to jail.” She nodded, eyes bright with a rage she could no longer aim at us.

Bridges called two days later. “Dr. Benson’s license is suspended. Three other families came forward after the story ran. He’ll never practice again.” The words felt like removing a rock from my shoe I didn’t realize I’d been walking on.

Eden found a shoebox apartment two blocks from campus with a window that faced a brick wall and still felt like sunlight. She sent me photos of the food the shelter nutritionist suggested: toast with peanut butter, oatmeal with bananas, actual pizza. “It feels weird to eat without earning it,” she texted. “But I’m doing it anyway.” She put herself on the waiting list for eating‑disorder counseling at student health.

Miles started physical therapy. “The therapist said my joints look like a retired linebacker’s,” he wrote. He joined a support group for men who had been abused and apologized again for the night at the dorm. “I know you may never forgive me,” he texted. I didn’t tell him forgiveness is not a door you knock on once. I told him I was glad he was safe.

Natalie got a job at the art‑supply store downtown. She sent me a photo of her hand holding a paintbrush in the stockroom. Her fingers trembled slightly. “Not ready to show anyone yet,” she said. “But I’m painting.”

The financial‑aid office approved my dependency override. My aid returned. FERPA blocks stayed. I registered for a full load in the fall. The registrar emailed confirmation with a smiley face, which felt both ridiculous and right. That night I slept through until morning for the first time since I left the farmhouse.

Mom tried to reach around the restraining order through a cousin once. The probation officer documented it and warned her: one more and jail. The system, for once, held.

On a bright Saturday, the three of us—me, Eden, and Natalie—met for coffee at a place with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu. We sat by the window and practiced the shapes of our ordinary lives. Eden ordered a breakfast sandwich and ate all of it, wiping her fingers with a napkin like a person in a commercial. Natalie doodled on the paper sleeve around her cup, flowers and eyes and a little house with an open door. I talked about my classes without making myself small. We stayed three hours. No one timed our answers. No one corrected our roles.

The fall semester began under a sky so blue it felt like somebody had overcorrected the saturation. I walked to English Comp without checking over my shoulder. In class, I raised my hand and said something smart and the professor said, “Excellent point,” and the world didn’t crack open. After, I went to the library and sat at a table by the window and highlighted a chapter on memory for Psychology without asking anyone’s permission to understand it.

I kept the birth certificates in a manila folder at the back of my desk drawer. Some nights I took them out and looked at the cursive, at the way my mother had turned a pen into a weapon and a word into a sentence. Then I slid them back and put my notebook on top. On the first page I had written, in letters big enough to read from across the room: I DECIDE WHO I AM.

Healing is a boring verb for a complicated thing. It looked like Eden keeping granola bars in her bag and not apologizing. It looked like Natalie leaving paint under her nails and not scrubbing it off before she came over. It looked like Miles limping on a good brace into a support group meeting and telling the truth out loud. It looked like me, at two in the morning, waking from a nightmare, naming five things I could see, four I could touch, three I could hear, two I could smell, one I could taste, and then going back to sleep because no one was coming through my door.

I still jump sometimes when I hear a certain tone in a stranger’s voice, the one that sounds like the beginning of a rule. I still walk a little faster past the pharmacy aisle. I still keep Officer Nash’s card in my wallet behind my student ID. But the fear no longer lives in the center of the room. It hovers near the ceiling like a spider I can see and choose not to kill.

On awards night in the spring, they called my name for an essay prize. They called Wyatt’s for a citizenship award—the principal said it belonged to a kid who lifts others. He flushed bright and tried to hide in his hoodie. Afterward, our foster mom (because by then the paperwork was done and that word was real) asked if we wanted ice cream. We said yes. We ate it in the parking lot leaning against the car, the summer air soft around us, laughing at a joke I don’t remember because the punch line was the ease itself.

When finals ended, I walked across campus past the spot where Nash had cuffed my mother. The grass had grown back. A new freshman sat under the tree with a laptop, mouth open in concentration. I wanted to tell her: You’re allowed to be exactly this serious about the life you’re building. Instead, I kept walking, down the steps, into a day full of errands and nothing to fear.

If you want the practical ending, it’s this: my mother is on probation with a ten‑year no‑contact order; Dr. Benson will never practice medicine again; the farmhouse sits empty, its mailbox full of flyers.

If you want the better ending, it’s this: language is not a diagnosis, and love is not a cage. The roles my mother wrote in pen were never the truth. Natalie is smart and also an artist. Eden is beautiful and also an athlete in recovery who runs because it feels like freedom, not because it burns calories. Miles is strong and also allowed to cry. And me? I was never the dumb one. I am a woman in a campus library highlighting a chapter she understands, a sister ordering another cup of coffee, a student with a future she chose.

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, I sat on the front steps of my apartment with Eden and watched the light move across the brick. Somewhere down the block a kid practiced trumpet and missed half his notes. The sound rose in imperfect orange ripples, and I laughed because imperfection looked like permission. Eden asked what was funny.

“Everything,” I said, and meant it.

We stood. We went inside. We made garlic bread and ate it with our fingers, talking with our mouths full. No one timed our answers. No one corrected our roles. No one called us back to an ecosystem that was never anything but a lie.

I closed the window against the evening and sat at my desk. I wrote my name at the top of a fresh page—Laya—and watched the line of the last letter tilt up at the end. Then I started on my homework.