Me at 15's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

I sat in history class staring at the Italy trip permission slip on my desk. My best life was supposed to start in Rome. I'd been saving babysitting money for months, adding up lira conversions in the margins of my notebook. But Dad's business was failing and we had to move to Oshawa instead. The trip got cancelled. I didn't cry about it where anyone could see. The map of Italy stayed folded in my drawer at the new apartment in Oshawa. The building had peeling white paint and vines creeping up the sides like it was trying to pull itself apart. I opened the map once, traced the red lines from Rome to Florence to Venice, then folded it back up. The routes didn't go anywhere now. I kept it anyway, pressed flat under my English textbook where no one would ask about it. Friday nights still happened at the kitchen table, but everything felt wrong. I turned on my radio in my room after dinner, kept the volume low enough that I thought Dad wouldn't notice. He knocked on my door within minutes. Turn it down. I did. He knocked again an hour later. Turn it down. The music wasn't even loud. I wrote three pages that night about a girl who lived in a city where no one told her what to hear. The Italy trip would have been my proof that good things could happen to me without falling apart. Now I had a map that led nowhere and a radio I couldn't play. I stopped telling people I was excited about anything. It was easier that way. If I didn't want things out loud, no one could watch them disappear.