Chapter 5 - THE SYSTEMThey didn't let me go home. Not that I had a home to go back to.
My mother, playing the part of the terrified but loving parent, convinced the state psychiatrists that I was a danger to myself and my family. Because I refused to speak, they diagnosed me with severe trauma-induced mutism and pyromania.
At seven years old, I was surrendered to the state and placed in a high-security psychiatric youth facility.
The day they took me away, my mother came to say goodbye. She knelt in front of me in the sterile waiting room of the Department of Child Services.
"You brought this on yourself," she whispered, her smile bright for the social workers watching through the glass. "You shouldn't go looking in places that don't belong to you."
She stood up, adjusted her designer coat, and walked away. Jessica didn't even look at me. She was busy playing a game on her phone.
What my mother didn't know was that the night the fire investigators pulled me from the floorboards, one of the paramedics had found the iron key clutched in my soot-stained fist. Thinking it was a comfort object, a piece of my destroyed home, the kind nurse at the hospital had slipped it onto a leather string and tied it around my neck before they transferred me. The note was gone—burned or thrown away with my clothes—but I had the key.
The youth facility was a nightmare of linoleum floors, screaming children, and apathetic orderlies. But I didn't break.
The fire had burned away the frightened little girl who just wanted her mother’s love. In her place, something cold and hard began to forge. I stopped crying. I stopped asking for help. I became a ghost in the system.
I spent my days in the facility's library, reading everything I could get my hands on. Law, psychology, finance, chemistry. While the other kids were fighting over television channels, I was studying how the world actually worked. How power was accumulated. How lies were maintained.
Every night, I would hold the heavy iron key beneath my thin, scratchy blanket. I would trace its jagged edges until my fingers bled.
The key opens the safety deposit box at First National.
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My father’s words echoed in my mind, a relentless drumbeat that kept me alive. My mother thought she had buried me alive in the system. She thought I would rot here, forgotten and insane.
She was wrong. She hadn't buried me. She had planted me.
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