Page 4 of Age of Shade

I’m exhausted, and I haven’t even opened my eyes yet.

On the floor beside me, my phone chirps loudly, announcing the beginning of yet another endless day. I think (groggily) that I deserve some sort of award for not chucking it at the wall. It would feel good, a convenient way to vent some of my frustration, but I thankfully have enough self-control to keep myself from breaking something I can’t afford to replace.

What is wrong with me?

I’ve been running on four hours of sleep for years now. It’s a necessity when you’re trying to cram four years of college into three, not get fired from two jobs, and perform admirably enough in an internship to lock down a solid reference. Technically, I could work less at the coffee shop and get a few more hours of rest every night. However, I did the math and the money I earn from the extra work makes up for the six—or eight—cups of coffee I have to drink throughout the day to keep my brain operational.

Unfortunately, anythinglessthan four isn’t an option, because shit tends to go south. Fast. I basically dissolve intoa useless puddle of goo: dropping things, forgetting where I’m going, and walking into stationary objects. I still have scars from the great lamp-post collision of last summer, and I ended up having to miss an entire week of work because my boss wouldn’t let me serve coffee and stale donuts with a giant scab on my forehead.

After years of trial and error, the four-hour rule has been thoroughly tried, tested, and cemented into law.It works, damn it, and I can’t understand why it’s suddenly…not. In this city, time is money, and I’m broke as fuck. I can’t afford to sacrifice more of my day to something as unproductive as sleep, which makes my current predicament all the more stressful.

Last night, it was all I could do to finish cleaning Doctor Roth’s practice before collapsing on the couch in his office, fully dressed. That was just before midnight, which means I got a fullsixhours of sleep. That’s way more than enough, more than I’ve allowed myself in weeks, but I’m still just as bone-tired as I was yesterday.

Maybe I’m getting sick?

A familiar prickle of anxiety forces me to crack one eye, staring blearily around at the office for signs I missed something in my usual cleaning routine. Everything looks as it should, but I’ll do a quick scan of the building before I leave for the day. I can’t lose this job. Not just because I need the money—and having a free place to sleep is the only reason I can afford to go to college—but because the thought of letting down Doctor Roth is unbearable.

The night we met happened to be my personal rock bottom.

After an entire childhood that was, objectively, one shitty turn of events after another, I’d stopped expecting anything to go right for me. At only seventeen, I was so worn down by life that the prospect of dying alone on the cold, dark street wasn’tscary. I’dseenscary, lived and breathed it. A quiet, anonymous death seemed like a mercy.

What did it matter if I died? Nobody knew me, nobody was looking for me, and there wasn’t a single soul who would miss me if I vanished off the face of the Earth. My entire existence was just… clutter: useless, unimportant, and taking up space that could be used for someone else.

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Sure, butit doesn’t matter, and neither did I.

I don’t know how long I was sitting on that sidewalk, ignored or avoided by every single person who passed me by, one more homeless teenager on the streets of New York. The tears had been dry on my cheeks for hours, and the panic gripping my chest had long since faded to the occasional, dull twinge. In fact—and I’m still not sure if it was the cold or my emotional state—I didn’t feel much of anything in that moment.

I didn’t know it, but for the first time in my life, I’d unwittingly ended up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

Doctor Roth didn’t walk past me like every other person on the street that day.

He saw me.

He thought I mattered.

He gave me a chance.

At first, I thought the guy talking to me was going to offer me cash to pee on him or something. Creeps who prey on homeless, seventeen-year-old runaways aren’t exactly few and far between. I was numb, and tired, and kind of hoping I would freeze to death sooner rather than later because the whole business was pretty boring, but I wasn’t concerned about handling myself. I had a five-inch steak knife in my pocket, and my hand hadtightened on the handle with every word the strange guy said to me.

Heseemednice, but even then, I had enough experience with selfish, cruel people to know that in the beginning, they don’tseemselfish and cruel. You can’t know someone’s true motives, and I was willing to bet every penny I didn’t have that the guy wasn’t talking to me out of the goodness of his heart.

The longer he spoke, though, the more difficult it became to keep telling myself that. His voice was kind, gentle, and endlessly patient, even while I was being a bit of an asshole.

Then, somehow, his offer managed to shatter the sense of numbness and quiet, grim acceptance that had protected me from my own feelings. All the shit I’d buried deep down, that I never wanted to think about ever again, came rushing to the surface and it was terrible. Laying on the couch in his office that first night, I allowed myself to cry for the first time in what must have been years. Huge, gut-wrenching, gasping sobs that probably sounded like I was dying. Iwasn’tdying, though. I was alive.I was freakin’ alive, and it was kind of terrifying to realize that I wanted to stay that way.

As crazy as it sounds, one single person treating me like a human being—like my life was worth saving—was all it took for me to start hoping that things might just get better. Maybe there were people that were good. Maybe the world wasn’t quite as terrible a place as it had always been to me, and maybe—just maybe—all that shitty luck had finally run out.

I still didn’t trust him, though.

For weeks, I slept clutching the knife under my pillow and carefully waited in the shadows of the buildings across the street for him to leave every night. I signed all communication with a fake name, Allison, just in case he got curious and decided to look up Adina Collier in the state’s database of missing people. Nobody was out searching for me, but child protective serviceswould certainly swoop in and drag me back to the group home if a well-meaning dentist told them where to find me. There were only six months until my eighteenth birthday, and it was a risk I couldn’t take.

It hasn’t been easy, clawing my way up from rock bottom with no one to fall back on but myself, but I’ve done it… Well, I’vekind ofdone it. In a haphazard, sleep-deprived, no-idea-what-I’m-doing kind of way.

Let’s call it a work in progress.

My life still seems to hang in perpetual limbo between homelessness and stability, swinging one way or the other depending on how many hours I manage to snag at the coffee shop. It’s always in the back of my mind that I’m one lost job or unexpected medical bill away from the life I’ve built like a deck of cards falling down around me. Even with all that, though, I’m so much luckier than some people in my situation. I got my GED, I’m in college, and I have two jobs and a safe place to sleep.

If I disappeared, people would notice.

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