The funny thing about rain is that it functions like a time machine. The smell of wet asphalt and ozone always drags me back to that night: October 14th, 2011.
I remember coming home from school that Tuesday with a lightness in my step that feels foreign to recall now. I had aced my algebra test. My mind was cluttered with the mundane debris of teenage life—dinner plans, homework, the vintage band poster I was saving my allowance to buy. I had absolutely no idea that in less than an hour, I would be fighting for my life on the side of a highway.
The moment I stepped through the front door, the air in the house felt pressurized, like the cabin of a plane before a crash.
My father was standing in the center of the living room. He looked like a volcano in the seconds before eruption—trembling, silent, lethal. His face was the color of raw meat. His hands shook violently; in one fist, he clenched a wad of cash, and in the other, two empty prescription pill bottles.
My sister, Karen, stood right behind him. She was nineteen, four years my senior, and she wore an expression that was a masterpiece of manufactured grief. Her brow was furrowed, her lips parted in shock—the perfect picture of a devoted older sister who had just discovered something horrific about her baby sibling.
But I saw her eyes. I caught the micro-expression she couldn’t quite scrub away. It was a flicker of pure, unadulterated satisfaction.
Our stepmother, Jolene, hovered in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over her chest, lips pressed into a thin, white line. That was Jolene’s specialty: witnessing atrocities and saying absolutely nothing.
My father didn’t even let me drop my backpack. He started screaming before the door fully latched behind me.
“You’ve been stealing from me for months!”
He threw the cash at my feet. “Buying pills? Hiding them in your room like a junkie?”
“Dad, I don’t—”
