Chapter 2

When the SATs came, my brother got into a mid-tier state school.

Going there meant asking home for four or five thousand a month in living expenses.

Meanwhile, back in tenth grade, my test scores were often over six hundred.

To free up more money for my brother, they decided to pull me out of school.

They even said they'd found me a good job.

My mother said it to my face, cold:

"What's the point of college? Plenty of graduates end up delivering takeout."

"Why waste the money?"

"Listen to me. I've already lined up a job for you."

"Going to work now just saves you a few wasted years."

I asked her:

"If college is so useless, then why does Blake get to go?"

"If working now saves you wasted years,"

"then why don't you make Blake quit and go to work?"

By then I wasn't a naive little kid anymore.

And she knew I'd been hammered hard enough that hitting me got her nowhere.

She screamed at me, furious:

"I'm being nice to you, and you won't listen. Are you trying to send me to an early grave?"

"I don't care about your excuses or whatever you're thinking. You are not going to that school, and that's final!"

I was so angry I said it straight out:

"Don't think I don't know what you're after."

"You're pulling me out so I'll work and hand it all over to feed Blake's spending!"

She rounded on me like a snarling dog:

"You ungrateful brat, what's that look for?"

"I raised you all these years. Isn't it only right you take a little of the pressure off me now?"

"Besides, you're a girl. Sooner or later you'll marry off."

"However much I spend raising you, in the end it all goes to some other family anyway."

I glared hard at her.

"So that's what you really think."

Coldly, she said:

"Either way, you're not getting the tuition."

"Tomorrow you report to the factory!"

I was livid.

And in my heart I knew there was no fighting her back then.

My only hope was my father.

I waited and waited for him to get home from work, then told him through tears that I wanted to stay in school.

He sighed.

"Prissy, sweetheart, it breaks my heart too. I want you in school as well."

"But you know how things are with us right now."

"Your mother's at home with no job. This whole family runs on the few thousand a month I bring in."

"And your brother needs four or five thousand a month on his own, on top of what it costs to feed and keep everyone."

"There's just no money left to send you to school."

That was it. All hope gone.

From that moment I understood it completely.

To them my life was worth nothing.

In this house I could count on no one.

The only person I could lean on was myself.

I did as I was told and went to the factory.

But I also went fully off the rails.

Making five thousand a month, I bought a phone that cost over ten thousand, bags that cost tens of thousands.

My pay was always gone before month's end. Gone, and then some, until I was in debt.

Every time they came to me, I stuck my hand out first to shut them up:

"I'm broke. Got any cash for me?"

"You wouldn't squeeze a poor girl who's already drowning in debt, would you?"

"You wouldn't, right? You wouldn't?"

I chased them with it.

Until they couldn't even look me in the face.

I would not give them the smallest opening to bleed me dry.

I thought that was how it would stay.

But I never imagined that, under their endless coddling,

my brother would end up gravely ill so young after all.

Sick enough to need a new kidney.

For a moment none of them could accept the news.

After a long silence, my mother's eyes went straight to me:

"Prissy, the only thing that can save your brother now is you giving him a kidney. He's your own flesh and blood. You don't want to watch him left crippled this young, do you?"