Alice

My name is Alice and I ran away from my home at sixteen. I was born in Fargo, North Dakota to a mother who loved me less than she loved the fentanyl she was addicted to and to a father who left the second he heard I was a girl. The only way I survived as long as I have is because my mother’s husband, Frank, who will never be my daddy, found us a month in January a month after I was born. He said he would help us if my mother worked for him, mom never knew what the work she would be doing was, she just wanted more money for drugs. Frank turned out to be the only pimp living in Fargo, North Dakota and started forcing my mother to sell herself to the small number of clients that would pay for prostitution.

By the age of five, Frank stopped caring about me and only let me live with him as long as my mom kept doing her job. At ten I realized I was asexual, I saw what my mom was doing just to keep us warm and I never wanted to do that. The clock started ticking as to when I would have to leave, so at sixteen I decided to run from Fargo as far as I could. I ended up in Savanna, Georgia working in a cafe to pay my rent and going to high school during the day. Because of all the trouble that I had at home in Fargo I had learned to spend most of my time in either the school’s library or the public library down the street. I was a perfect student, top of my class in both of my high schools and knowing that I would have a better future than my mother.

When I was applying to colleges I knew I had to put myself out there and I applied to Vasser and the University of Georgia. The only two places I had time to apply to with my studies and work at the cafe. Vasser accepted me! I was thrilled, and I got almost a full ride for my four years there. At Vasser, I founded the asexual awareness club so I could meet people like me and so that I could increase the acceptance of asexual people on campus. By senior year our club had twenty members and we were the most respected club on campus, we were finally able to buy a house off-campus and are known to throw killer parties to this day providing a safe space for all. After my senior year, I didn’t know what I would do with myself, I got a bachelors in English and Theater arts but I didn’t want to be a teacher so I started writing. I got published in the New York Times and the New Yorker, both offered me jobs and I accepted the New York Times’s offer and I began to write about war and conflict. The Times sent me off to South Sudan so that I could write about the conflict there. I went to South Sudan and got shot at so many times I lost count, but I wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles. I finally called my mom and she invited me back to come to see her, she said she had gotten clean and out of Frank’s influence and she was a teacher at the local elementary school now. I decided to fly out to see her, I landed in Fargo and decided to take an Uber, we were pulling out of the airport and got T-boned by a drunk driver. I was brought to the local hospital and started feeling better when I decided to write this, but I don’t know if something feels a little off with me lately. I’m going to ask my doctor about it, Doctor!

Alice died of an infection she got during surgery to fix her broken arm, she was 34.