“GET OUT AND DON’T EVER CALL US AGAIN!”
My father’s scream still echoed in the hollows of my skull. It had been two months since that night, yet I could still feel the heavy, damp canvas of my duffel bag hitting my chest as he threw it into the freezing rain. I can still see my mother, a pale ghost lingering behind the pristine lace curtains of our suburban Columbus, Ohio home, her eyes wide but her mouth stitched shut by her own cowardice. They had left me—sixteen, terrified, and seven months pregnant—with nothing but thirty wrinkled dollars and a fault line cracked wide open right through my chest.
My name is Elena Vance. Before the two pink lines appeared on that plastic stick, I was an honors student. I was the captain of the debate team. I was the pride of a wealthy, deeply religious community where appearances were the currency of survival. But the moment my secret was laid bare, I was transformed from a daughter into a disease.
The transition from a featherbed to the cold, unforgiving reality of the streets was brutal. My belongings were now entombed in a rusted locker at the Greyhound bus station. I spent my days scrubbing grease off linoleum at a local diner, paid entirely under the table by a manager who looked the other way in exchange for cheap labor. I slept on a threadbare couch in a friend’s basement until her parents found out and quietly asked me to leave. The physical and emotional toll was a slow, crushing weight. My ankles swelled until they blurred into my calves, the mounting pressure in my abdomen a constant reminder of the life growing inside a vessel that could barely sustain itself.
The sharp, rhythmic stabs began exactly at 2:13 AM.
