The only difference between me and the mouse was that the mouse didn’t have the power I had. I felt that I could come out the victor, that there was something inside of me that wanted to prove herself in all the ways I wasn’t expected to, in all the ways my mother had tried to prevent and my father had failed to tell me about. In a lot of ways, this felt like more than just my first day of school. It felt like the first day of my real life.
