Dear Lillian,

Rasheeda is off today. The other girl is not kind or gentle and I hate her. The food here is for the birds and she expects me to eat it and be happy about it at the same time. Good luck missy. She’s young and stupid and won’t last long. The young and stupid ones never do.

But I was young and stupid once, although it feels like it all happened on a different planet during a different time in space. I would hear Rose say things like that, especially when she started college. And I feel like that’s the best way to describe it. That’s how far away my youth feels, different planet, different time, different me. A girl who seems to have only existed on these pages and not the dusty old woman in an old age home, slowly dying from an...

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