“It was my seventh birthday.” He squeezes his eyes shut. “I’d been watching kids—kids my age—get on the school bus from our living room window for months. I wanted to join them…but I couldn’t.” His nostrils flare. “It was public school, for fuck’s sake, so it’s not like she had to pay for it. All she had to do was bring me up there and talk to someone about enrolling me, but things—drugs—kept getting in the way.”
