“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A doctor!” the young girl beamed.
“Why?”
“Because I want to help many, many people and save lives!”
“What a good little girl! Be sure to study well to achieve your dreams!”
Sarah jolted awake in her pile of ashy newspapers, the excruciating lie that she had repeated thousands of times ringing in her ears. For a second, she was convinced that everything that had happened over the past few weeks was simply a bad dream, a nightmare that bubbled up and dissipated as quickly as it came. Maybe she was still the golden child of her town. Maybe she could still be that calculus genius, that physics prodigy, and that national speech-and-debate winner that people looked up to and worshiped like the stars. There was a chance that she might still be recognized as one of Harvard’s best students, at the top of her class with a 4.0 GPA, and on track to an easy acceptance to medical school. She could still have everything that mattered to her, everything that only seemed to matter to her parents. She could still be living someone else’s life.
But now, that reality seemed as dead as the rats that lay before her. She didn’t know where it all went wrong, but somehow, somewhere, a part of her snapped and flung her to rock bottom. Here she was, nestled between two dumpsters on a mattress of newspapers with a garbage bag for a pillow. She had spent twenty years of her life building her way up to the top, to a peak she wanted to climb to… and that broke her. One morning, she couldn’t motivate herself to get out of bed, to open her textbook, to torture herself with a lecture, to do anything that was once forced upon her. For the next few weeks she was falling, falling, falling, her life crumbling into ashes and dust until she somehow found herself penniless and fragmented on the streets.
Sarah squinted as the sun lit up the dark alleyway. Her stomach growled, begging for the first hot meal in days that wasn’t infested with maggots. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and Sarah leaned into the dumpster in search of some food. She tore through a bag of soggy waffles and gray maple syrup that coated her hands in a slimy grease.
Sarah struck gold on her next catch: six slices of pizza with only a few blotches of black and blue mold scattered on the cheese. She scraped off the nasty bits and ate ravenously, devouring each piece in seconds. It didn’t matter that the pizza was dripping dumpster juices or that she had whisk away a few cockroaches that fought to steal her meal. Food was food.
Sarah’s eyelids grew heavy as she swallowed the last of the pizza. This shouldn’t have been the time for resting. She should have been wide awake, working on herself and pulling herself up by the bootstraps like her parents had always bragged about themselves doing. She should have been well on her way to a six-figure job with a shiny degree by now, like everyone had expected. But the past few weeks had utterly destroyed her. Sleep was the only thing she craved.
Before long, Sarah slipped into unconsciousness, her mind tumbling through her childhood memories. There she was, running around a sunny park, dribbling a soccer ball through the waves of grass. It was not long before her mother came to drag her back to her studies.
“Five more minutes, please?”
“You’ve had enough exercise, young lady. It’s time to read now!”
“But…”
“Now!” huffed her mother as she grabbed her arm and yanked her towards their house away from the ball. “You’re lucky I even let you outside after that score you got.”
“But mom, it was only a B+.”
Her mother slapped her face. “Don’t talk back to me! If you live with that mentality, you’ll end up a failure on the streets. If you don’t study, don’t ever expect to set foot in our house again.”
Sarah watched her mother drag her wretched, younger self into their house. As the door slammed shut, Sarah was whisked away to another memory. This time, it was at her middle school’s open house, where she was standing in front of an easel. She had spent days on this painting, mixing the colors into vibrant hues and meticulously shaping the paint from indiscernible splotches to mountains, trees, lakes, and even people.
“First place,” her father commented dully. “That’s…good.”
“Isn’t this amazing?” Sarah asked. “The art teacher says with my skill, I could make millions.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, honey,” her father chuckled, hiding his disgust behind a fake laugh. “You would have to compete with thousands of artists just as good as you.”
Sarah frowned. Was this not enough for him? She flipped through a mental list of accomplishments. “Well, do you want to see my science project that got an A?”
Her father grinned, his facade no longer showing. “Of course. Now that’s something useful.”
Sarah blinked, and before she knew it, she was in front of a crystal-clear lake with a boy whose eyes were as sparkling as the water next her. What was his name again? Sarah frantically searched her mind. She had repressed the thought of him for so long that he was like a ghost to her. Harley? Harry? No. It was Henry.
“Please, Sarah, we can still be together, right?” he begged, clutching her palms with his moist hands. “I’ve got good grades and everything! And you said that I was the only person that understood how you felt! Don’t let your parents get in the way.”
Sarah almost acquiesced. Like her, Henry was another straight-A student that was hellbent on success and perfection. Unlike her, he realized how to save his soul as well as succeed in life. Only he could have guided her away from the pit she was walking towards. But her parents’ warnings still rang in her mind: We don’t see the drive for success in him. He will be nothing in the future, so don’t waste your time with him.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t,” Sarah choked, her vision blurred by tears. “You know how it is.”
“But, Sarah, you can’t let them decide your life for you,” Henry began. “Please, just-”
“No.” Sarah’s voice hardened. “No. H-have you seen them? Have you lived under their glares for your whole life yet? I cross them once and I’m done. I’ll have nothing. No roof to live under, no food in my mouth—nothing.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re strong. You can decide your own path. You can have your own dreams. Not just theirs.”
“Their dream?” Sarah murmured. “What was their dream?”
Henry grabbed her shoulders and shook her back and forth. “Get it together. Are you telling me that you willingly decided to spend your whole life studying? That all you wanted was to be holed up in your room cramming your head with useless information so that you could see a number tick up when you look at your gradebook? Do you really want to waste the next ten years of your life in a hell of tests and homework and projects so you can get a shiny certificate with your name plastered on the front? Think, Sarah! You damn well know they told you to think this way.”
“I-I-I-” Sarah stammered. Some part of her accepted his words. They were the truth. But she had dedicated her entire life to a lie, and she was not ready to throw that all away. She was not ready to break free. Sarah only knew one way out of this conversation, and it was by repeating a line that she had rehearsed so many times it had lost its meaning to her. “I-I-I want this. I need this. I want to be a doctor. I want to help people.”
Henry tried to speak but he hesitated. Nothing he could say would change her mind. He nodded solemnly and trudged away, his silhouette fading from her memories. This “failure” would go to create a startup that would be worth several million a few years after he graduated. In the end, he had found the path Sarah couldn’t.
Sarah jolted awake, her hands outstretched, trying to reclaim her lost treasures. She had hundreds of dreams just like this one where she could’ve changed her life. One choice, one act of rebellion, one word, could have plucked her out of this dark, destitute alley. But of all the dreams she could have grasped, she clung stubbornly to the wrong one.
The day had passed, and the city was now pitch black. The only object she could make out in the distance was a payphone underneath a pale streetlight. Sarah reached into her pockets and pulled out a quarter and a few dimes.
Maybe she could call her parents and beg them to accept her again and help her get back on her feet. She would promise to be the obedient slave that they had raised, she would swear to never stray from the path they set for her again. If she was lucky, she hadn’t been kicked out of school and she could still go back and…
And do what? Spend the rest of her life in a prison of books and paperwork? Did she really want that? Sarah stopped walking towards the payphone and stared at her feet.
A murky puddle on the ground answered her question. Sarah glared at the filthy, mottled rat in front of her. Leaves and debris stuck out of her hair like she was a caveman.
I s this who you want to be? Is this your dream? Didn’t you say you want to be a doctor to help people? Sarah forced herself. That was her dream, to help people, wasn’t it? Sarah allowed that lie to delude her again as she marched towards the payphone and pushed the coins in the machine. She had forgotten the impetus of her fall.
“Excuse me ma’am, could you spare some change?” a raspy voice called behind her.
Sarah’s hairs raised up on her arms. She turned to face a scraggy homeless man, his teeth yellow and rotten from years of substance abuse.
“Ple-please spare me some,” he stuttered, reaching out his rotting arms. “I-I-I need eat. N-need food. D-don’t make me take from you.”
“Please don’t hurt me,” Sarah quivered, her heart ramming against her ribcage. She wanted to sprint with all her might but her legs locked up in terror. “This is the last of my money. I just want to call my parents, alright?”
Without listening to her pleas, the man lunged at her hands. Sarah dodged and stumbled onto the curb, scraping her knees as she fell onto the sidewalk.
“My money, my money!” the man hooted. “Gimmee, gimmee! I just want food!”
Sarah was tempted to just throw the money at him and be done with it. But that twenty cents was her way back to normalcy. She just needed one call to fix her life, to reclaim that dream that was never hers.
Sarah stood up on trembling feet. “Go away,” she growled, ready to kill for her coins, “You’re not getting anything from me.”
The man fell to his knees. “Help me, ma’am, help! Be a kind soul, would ya? No drugs for this money! Only food, eh? I swear!”
The man scurried forwards, his arms swiping at Sarah. “Please help me! Just a bit!”
Sarah clung stubbornly to the two dimes in her palm. “I’m not a charity. Find someone else!”
The man gripped her arms, his grimy fingernails ripping into her skin. Sarah screamed, jerking away to throw the man off her. He grunted and dug his feet into the ground. Sarah’s forearms were now dripping in blood, but she still clenched her fists to protect the vestiges of her dream. She couldn’t throw it all away now.
“Get off me!” Sarah roared. With all her might, she pushed the man into a nearby bar window and he pulled her with him. The glass shattered and both of them tumbled into the bar, the broken shards digging into their skin. The man recovered first and crawled on all fours to her, froth flying from his mouth. Adrenaline got the better of Sarah. Her fingers searched for a weapon, finding a jagged shard of glass the size of a dagger. She closed her eyes and thrust it into him.
For the next few hours, Sarah laid on the blood-stained ground, unable to face the consequences of her actions. She had killed for her dream, one that hadn’t even been true to her. She had just proved herself a hypocrite. Sarah didn’t bother getting up. Instead, she simply stared into the void of the ceiling, contemplating how she could continue to delude herself. With blood on her hands, she knew her childhood lie was over. And so Sarah laid there, her dreams as shattered as the glass around her, with only a nightmare to contend with.
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