I had been looking forward to my honors graduation party for months. Not in the way people look forward to things they feel entitled to, not with the assumption that celebration was owed to me simply for existing, but with the particular anticipation of someone who had worked very hard for something and allowed herself, carefully and almost cautiously, to believe she was permitted to be proud of it. I had earned the honors distinction. I had earned the party. I had earned one evening that did not arrange itself around my brother’s emotional weather.
My name is Audrey Sutton, and I was eighteen years old the night my parents canceled my graduation party because Brandon was upset about a trip.
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