["Walls and a roof over your head. It's funny what people claim is a suitable home."]
Mold clung to the interior of the peeling paint of the house that was left in such a mess it looked as though a tornado had swept through. In his lonesome, the thin boy sat in his room on a cut-up mattress left without a bedframe, scribbling on the homework assigned to him.
Toys were a distant dream, and books would only be pawned off by his deadbeat parents. The only form of entertainment the child found for himself was schoolwork.
The math equations brought his mind to a different place, one that didn't smell of ashtrays and mildew.
["It's not like I had lofty aspirations of "making it out of poverty" or something like that. Genuinely, I just wanted to be distracted—to think I'm somewhere else."]
