“I was twelve when I read through Harry Potter, pudgy stomach pressed to my raised-up mattress as I flicked from line to line, slack-jawed, immersed. There was a whole world between those soft, sharp-edged, cream pages. Rough cobbled roads winding through cities of bright colors, filled with children covered in black flowing robes sporting scraggly wooden wands, children my age enduring mystical journeys through school and competitions and threats to the fate of the entire world. My feet were kicked up on already too long legs behind me, swaying right below the ceiling fan. My tongue was stuck between my ADHD-ridden teeth, which would idly nibble at it as I got more and more lost. Those summer days, the world didn’t exist. Not the world I lived in, anyway.

I was fifteen when I was told to read Romeo and Juliet. At my full height, I rested my sad, slow Chromebook on my raised bed and stood next to it, eyes flickering like an electric chair was being run in another part of my body as I made a halfhearted attempt at the first part. There were no streets, though. No Juliet, no Romeo, no… whatever the other one’s names are. Othello? I cared as much about them as my greasy brown hair and unruly beard. Reading was work. Books were dipping my face into a bath of leeches, every time I flipped a page deeper was another chance to be sapped of energy until I was wrung dry. Once I found a website with all the notes I could need, for the first time in my life, I cheated on an English test, and I didn’t regret it for a second.

I was nineteen when I read One Last Stop, and it didn’t matter that my bed was no longer raised, that I was a girl now, that my hair was fluffy and dipped in blonde highlights or this or that or the other thing because I was on the New York subway. There were two women there, one with short black hair, tan skin, ripped jeans and a backpack, one with soft honey curls flowing over her red scarf and rounded glasses. They jumped slightly as the subway bounced, and they smiled at each other, chatting as the tension between them was a thick rope curled over itself, so tight it could pop. Nothing else mattered because I was in a shitty, run-down breakfast place with so much heart that I felt soft and warm as the syrup-soaked, slightly burnt pancakes on my plate. I was at a booming drag show, in an overstuffed apartment, in a life that brought tears to my eyes. My feet were kicked up on long legs, and my teeth were shining, and I was in summer all over again, bright and free.”