I wasn’t sure I deserved to be the one spared.
And after that tragic incident, I stopped living. I was drifting.
I ended up in a community shelter after a local volunteer service helped me get a room. They called it a dorm-style housing program for displaced youth, but it felt more like a halfway world stuck between disaster and a question mark.
I shared a room with another girl who never spoke.
There were two bathrooms per floor, and a kitchen shared with about 20 others. But it was warm, safe, and clean. I had a bed, and I was grateful.
I could’ve ended up with family, but Aunt Denise, my mom’s older sister and only living relative, said she didn’t have room for me.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, but there’s no space here,” she told me over the phone. “Your uncle uses the spare room for work. And I’m not giving up my reading nook for a teenager. I’m grieving too, you know.”
She might’ve been grieving, but she was alert enough to take half of the insurance money I received. She said she’d use it to help me out by getting me clothes, therapy, and whatever I needed.
Instead, she bought herself romance and detective books, a wine fridge, a new car, and started showing up at her weekly local book club in new outfits and designer hats. She called them her “grieving wardrobe” and said they made her look “expensive but in mourning.”
I didn’t argue and was too numb to protest. Besides, I’d already lost the most precious thing—my family. I consoled myself that at least I had a mattress, a mini desk, and quiet hours between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
During the day, I threw myself into school and studied as if my life depended on it, because honestly, it did. I needed scholarships to get into college. I needed a plan to find work and build a life on my own. I needed to matter to someone, even if that someone was just my future self.
But at night, when everyone else in the dorm scrolled through TikTok, played music from their phones, or watched TV in the common room, I took over the kitchen. I baked blueberry, apple, cherry, peach, and strawberry rhubarb pies when I could afford it.
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