I had an abusive boyfriend who was faking a back injury from his job as a navy mechanic so he could live on disability. I had already gigantically screwed up one job, and I was low-level incompetent at being a receptionist, spiking to appalling on a regular basis. But, anyway, New Zealand had no student loans back then, and you had to pay tuition up front. No one in my family had ever been and I lacked the cultural capital to understand what I had needed to do to even apply. But I was very aware that everyone else had gone off to college, and I could not. I was glad to see the back of everyone from high school: I'd been awkward and gawky and utterly overlooked, and the word frenemy had not yet been coined, or I would have understood why the one girl I thought was on my team consistently ran me down to others. The year after high school I was working a dead-end job as a receptionist for a company that ground lenses for prescription glasses. Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time.
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