Chapter 2 - THE ART OF SURVIVAL AND THE BOOT IN THE CLOSET
Living in that house meant learning a language of micro-surveillance. My bedroom was not a sanctuary; it was a holding cell with Pottery Barn bedding. My mother picked the curtains—heavy floral drapes that blocked out the afternoon light because "natural light makes young girls restless." Jessica stole my good lamp sophomore year because her room needed "better aesthetic balance for TikTok," and when I asked for it back, my mother accused me of hoarding. "Control creates safety," my mother used to say whenever she confiscated my journals, my art supplies, or my phone. Funny how safe people never needed to announce it every single morning like a weather forecast. By high school, I had learned to survive in pieces. A little silence here. A fake smile there. Straight A’s because grades were the exact currency my mother couldn't devalue without looking hypocritical to the neighbors and teachers at school.
I drew in secret, sketching in cheap notebooks with broken spines. I drew girls in cages, girls behind thick glass, girls with mouths stitched shut by heavy black thread. Then I met Maya. She sat beside me in advanced art class junior year, wearing ripped jeans, red Converse sneakers, and the kind of effortless, bruising confidence that made teachers sigh before she even opened her backpack. One afternoon, she looked over my shoulder while I was shading a charcoal drawing of a figure trapped inside a porcelain teacup. "That’s not just a birdcage," she said quietly. I froze, my pencil hovering over the paper. Most people saw graphite and artistic flair. Maya saw evidence. Over the next few weeks, I told her things in hushed whispers behind the bleachers during track practice. Small things first. The way my mother checked my phone history while I was in the shower. The way Jessica read my personal notebooks out loud at the dinner table while our mother laughed. The pills that made school feel like walking through a thick, gray fog where the edges of the world were smeared and distant.
Maya listened without making that pitying, sad face adults made right before they did absolutely nothing to help you. Finally, she looked me dead in the eye and said, "Caitlyn, that’s abuse." The word sat between us like a brick of contraband. Abuse was for Lifetime movies. For broken homes on the other side of town. For people with visible bruises and police sirens wailing in the night. Not for girls with clean report cards, monogrammed towels, and a mother who baked blueberry muffins for the local fire department. But once Maya said it, I couldn't unhear it. And neither could my mother. Jessica spotted us talking outside the art building two days later, whispering near the bicycle racks. That night, my mother walked into my room without knocking, took my phone off the nightstand, and didn't say a single word.
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The next morning, Maya’s parents called her into their kitchen before school. By lunch, Maya wouldn't look at me in the hallway. After the final bell, she pulled me into the dark, echoing shadows of the library stairwell, her eyes red-rimmed and furious. "My parents said I can’t hang out with you anymore," she whispered, her voice shaking. "Your mom came by the house last night. She told them you’re unstable, that you’re obsessed with me, and that I need to protect myself." I stood there, completely numb, as if someone had poured ice water down my spine. Maya grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard. "I don’t believe her, Caitlyn. I know it's a lie." That single sentence kept me breathing through the rest of high school, but it also taught me a brutal lesson: hope was too expensive. Planning was much cheaper.
I started hiding money. Loose quarters found in couch cushions. Dollar bills left on the kitchen counter. Birthday cash from an aunt in Oregon who only called once a year and forgot which grade I was in. I tucked a ten-dollar bill from babysitting inside a paperback copy of Jane Eyre because Jessica had once declared that classic literature made her "want to vomit from boredom." I set up a secret email account on a public computer at the county library, using a fake name and a password only I knew. I took tiny freelance design jobs online—creating flyers for local bakeries in Idaho, digital logos for Etsy shops, and birthday invitations for mothers who wanted pastel fonts and glitter graphics. I bought a cheap prepaid flip phone from Walmart with cash I had hoarded in a hollowed-out dictionary and hid the device inside an old, cracked leather work boot that sat at the very back of my closet. Left boot. Under the stiff, worn-out leather insole. That single hiding spot would eventually save my life. I also stopped swallowing the pills. Not all at once—I wasn't stupid enough to risk a sudden withdrawal that my mother could spot. I tucked them under my tongue during dinner, pretended to drink my water, and later flushed them down the downstairs guest toilet while everyone was watching television. Slowly, miraculously, my brain came back online. The fog lifted. The excuses vanished. I started writing everything down in a digital document stored in the cloud—dates, times, exact quotes from my mother, and photographs of my locked-out life. Documentation became my religion.
