My alarm goes off at 5:30 every morning, and the first thing I do before I’m even fully awake is check the fridge. Not because I’m hungry at that hour. Because I need to know how to divide what we have.What Robin gets for breakfast, what goes in her lunch bag, what I hold back for dinner. The math is always the same and I do it quickly now, the way you get fast at things you do every single day until they stop feeling like calculations and start feeling like breathing. Robin is twelve.She doesn’t know I skip lunch most days. I’d like to keep it that way. I’m twenty-one years old.I should be in college figuring out who I am, the way people my age are supposed to be doing. I should be making mistakes and recovering from them and building something for myself in the slow, uncertain way young people build things. Instead I work the closing shift at a hardware store four nights a week and pick up whatever weekend work I can find, and Robin stays with Ms.

Brandy next door until I get home, and that is our life. It is not a bad life. But it is not the life either of us would have chosen.Our parents died when Robin was eight and I was seventeen. That is the whole explanation. There is no version of it that gets easier to say or softer to hear, so I usually just say it plainly and move forward, because moving forward is the only direction that has ever done us any good.I became her guardian because the alternative was the system, and I had watched the system from close enough range to know I didn’t trust it with her. So I stayed. I deferred every other plan indefinitely, put my name on the lease, got the job, learned to cook more than three things, learned to negotiate with landlords, learned to pack a school lunch that doesn’t embarrass her.I learned all of it as I went, the same way most people learn the things that actually matter, by needing to know them and having no other option. Robin is doing well in school. She is kind and funny and reads constantly and has opinions about everything.