At fourteen, the hunger in my stomach was a constant companion, gnawing and insistent, but it was the hunger in my heart—the quiet, aching shame—that weighed far heavier. Each day, I had to invent reasons for why I sat alone during lunch periods, why I slipped quietly into the library, why my tray remained untouched. “I forgot my lunch,” I would say casually, lightly, as though it were just another mundane mistake, like forgetting a pencil or a homework assignment. It was a lie, of course, though I wrapped it in such careful nonchalance that few questioned it. The truth—the one I couldn’t voice aloud—was that we simply could not afford lunch.

My mother worked night shifts at a dry cleaner, her hands roughened from years of pressing and folding, her body always tired, her wages swallowed almost entirely by rent and overdue bills. My father had disappeared years before, leaving a hollow silence, unspoken questions, and a stack of unpaid notices that piled higher with each passing month. And so, I hid. Every day, I buried myself among the towering shelves of the school library, trying to convince myself that I preferred the quiet, that I liked being invisible, that I was somehow choosing solitude.