I went to university absurdly young. Public school did not βlose meβ β it pushed me out until I was at the mercy of higher education, where intelligence is praised as long as it stays quiet and does not embarrass anyone important.
I had a scholarship. I had a social worker. I had trauma-brain. I was far out of my depth.
But I also had something else: I was programmed to work harder than everyone else.
Not out of ambition. Out of fear. Out of that orphanage wiring that whispers: If you do not earn your place, you will lose it.
I went to school full-time and worked full-time.Β And somewhere in that frantic schedule, I became something I never planned on becoming:
A necessity.
My roommates were rich. Legacy-rich. βMy family is alumni and this school is basically a private clubβ rich. And they hated me. Not because I was poor. But because I was useful, and without me? They would have flunked.
They detested the fact that I could do what they could not… quietly, efficiently, and without whining. I wrote papers for them. For profit.Β But the payment was not the point. The point was that I became a person they needed, and they resented needing anyone who did not come from their world.
They were not buying my friendship. They were buying my smarts. And they hated that too. They mocked my weirdness and my lack of social graces. All with a pinch of “bless your heart”s and covert racism.
People love to soften stories like this. A therapist once asked me if I thought they were my friends because they trusted me to write their papers. I do not even know what my face did, but it probably looked like a deadpan documentary shot of an animal witnessing human foolishness.
No.
They did not trust me. They knew I would not rat them out because I was more likely to get in trouble than they would (like the prostitute getting in more trouble than the john). They did not like me. They let me know daily that I was a charity case, nothing more. And they certainly did not respect me. Respect was reserved for people who had important parentage and chauffeurs.
They used me. I was a convenience with a pulse. A domestic with a pen.
I cleaned up their dirty clothes and their microwaved ramen pots.
I never slept. I used my bed for storage files. Not as a metaphor β literally. It became a shelf. Sometimes I napped in the library like a ghost haunting the stacks. Because I was not living a college life.
I was surviving in a museum of privilege.
And now for the part I am a bit proud of: I wrote the best pieces for those girls. The best.
And no, I was not even in their classes. I read the books. Then I read a few more. I sat in on one or two lectures.
Because honestly β what else did I have to do? Rest? Be a teenager?
I was not gifted that option.
So I did what my brain does best: I turned the whole situation into an education. I was not taking literature classes. I was pre-law, philosophy and ethics. Those papers became my side quests.
Screenwriting.
Poetry.
Literary criticism.
Three years of stolen electives. Three years of secret joy.
They thought they were extracting labour from me. But I was also extracting insight from them.
They paid me in cash. I paid myself in knowledge.
