I memorized rooms by counting steps. Fourteen steps from my bed to the bathroom. Twenty-two from the front door to the kitchen table. Six stairs to the basement, then a turn left.
I trained my ears to pick up the smallest things. The shift in someone’s breathing when they were about to lie. The little catch in a voice when someone was nervous. The way footsteps sound different on wood than on tile, on carpet than on concrete.
I learned that you can hear a smile. People think you can’t, but you can.
I finished high school with honors. I got into university. I studied social work, because I wanted to help kids like me, kids who’d had their whole world flipped upside down at the top of a swing.
My mother died when I was twenty. Breast cancer. It was fast. She held my hand in the hospital, the same way Niye’s mother had held it twelve years earlier.
