For twelve years, the whole school called her "Trash Girl" because her mother collected cans for a living — until graduation night, when she said one sentence into the microphone and four hundred people rose to their feet in tears.

I had been alone since four.

I'd eaten a heel of bread from a brown paper bag and watched the front window, and I was furious, the way only a ten-year-old can be.

"Where were you?"

"I had to take something back."

"Back where?"

"Out past Tehachapi. About an hour each way."

"Did they pay you?"

"A hug," she said, and laughed, tired and soft.

"We can't eat a hug."

"No," she agreed. "But somebody's mother was looking for that tonight."

She never told me what it was.

She only washed her hands at the sink and put out the last of the rice.

It was four years later, in the spring of ninth grade, when I found out.

I was on my hands and knees under the kitchen sink, hunting for a leaky pipe, when my fingers hit something that wasn't plumbing.

A black composition notebook, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.