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Kind.

I wanted her to get to stay that way.

So I fought off the bullies. I threatened the guys in the neighborhood, having to draw some blood over the years to make my point clear: I will pluck your eyes out of your fucking skull if you so much as look at her the wrong way.

In turn, she let me into her very different little world. With her grandma who loved her. With her books and her ambitions and her bright future.

I was the one who suggested she become a doctor, since she was taking care of me and her gran all the time, and seemed to enjoy it.

I was the one who quizzed her with her flashcards for her tests.

I was the one who brought her to museums and bookstores when she had a project or just wanted to get away from our area for a while.

I was the one who’d been with her when she’d gotten the acceptance letter from college.

But all we’d ever been… was friends.

I won’t lie, it wasn’t purely friendly feelings I had toward Ama.

I’d accepted that I was hopelessly fucking in love with her by the time we were twelve or thirteen. She loved me back, of course. Just not inthat way.

And, honestly, after a lifetime of not being loved in any way shape or form, I was fine with it being love of any kind.

She was the one who let me sleep on a pile of blankets on her floor, sneaking me in after her gran went to sleep, so I could get the fuck away from my old man who was always either high or detoxing, both of which made him a dick to me. And as I got older, yeah, he started to hit harder.

Teaching you to be a man, boy.

As if life hadn’t knocked me around enough at that point.

But those nights, Ama would tell me to wait for her to flick her bedroom lights three times, and that meant I could come up.

So I would.

And I’d curl up on her floor and listen to her read her books aloud to me so I could be a part of her nightly ritual.

I couldn’t tell you a fucking thing about the plots of those books. But I can tell you that drifting off to sleep to the sound of her voice was the closest to bliss I’d ever known in my entire life.

She was also the one who got me my first fucking birthday present. And she did so… every single year. She also made me cakes. Granted, they were the worst things I’d ever tasted in my life, but she’d made them. For me. Because she gave a shit that I’d been born, that I continued to live, despite the shady shit I got myself involved in on the daily.

She was the one who had half-dragged me to the clinic when I’d had a fever so high once that I was hallucinating. She was the one who sat in the waiting room, wringing her hands. She was the one to get me home again, make sure I was hydrated and taking my meds, bringing me ramen from the convenience store with the tiny bit of money she had to her name from babysitting some kids a block or two over on the weekends.

And, yeah, she was the voice of reason, often nagging me about smoking, about fighting, about drinking, about all the ways those things could fuck up my body and my future.

She really never liked my answer to those arguments.

Maybe I don’t have a future.

“Of course you have a future. What a stupid thing to say. We are going to get out of this neighborhood someday. We’re going to make something of ourselves, build nice lives.”

She was going to.

I didn’t have a single second of doubt about that.

After all the shit she went through in her late teens, it lit a fire up under her that had her even more determined.

She was going to become a doctor.

She was going to work at the clinic.

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