Dying In The Rain You Left Me In

My parents were distinguished university professors who cared about prestige above all else, and I was their defective product.

When I was ten, a neglected bout of scarlet fever destroyed my auditory nerves.

To scrub the disgrace of an imperfect child from their immaculate academic pedigree, they adopted Whitney—a healthy, bright-eyed girl—and relegated me to lip-reading drills and phoneme training in our back storage room. The rule was absolute: miss a single consonant, and my father’s polished mahogany cane came down across my spine.