Boy meets girl, girl falls in love, blah-blah-blah.
Let me be clear with you from the beginning. This is not that kind of story.
My name is Cait, and I live in the great city of New York. Okay, so maybe I've only lived here for a week and a half...
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I'm not sure what I expected when I told Val the truth about my family, but she responded in the absolute best way. There I was, sobbing on the sofa and practically shaking as I told her the truth about why I had let Danielle, aka - psycho central, ruin my life for the past six months, and Val simply rushed over to me and threw her arms around me.
She didn't demand an explanation or pepper me with questions. She didn't judge me for withholding my family's secret. She simply held me while I cried.
Eventually, I started babbling out incoherent sentences - mostly apologies - until I was finally able to form a thought. It was as if the floodgates had been open wide, the pressure that I'd been holding inside of me as it continued to build finally released, and Val listened patiently while I let it all out.
It made the most sense to start from the beginning, to open up and tell her all of the things I kept so perfectly hidden when we first met. My parents were born and raised in Venezuela, and I was very proud of my Venezuelan heritage. They started a family fairly young, and - by the time my sister was six - they were struggling to make ends meet. My uncle owned a company in Austin, and - after a lengthy visa application process - they were granted permission to move to the States. I was three when my parents became U.S. citizens, and I remember it vividly. My dad was so proud. He wanted more for us, more than we had available to us back in Venezuela. As U.S. citizens, he would always tell me that we could do anything.
"Dreams come true, cariña," he'd say as he tucked me into bed. "I got mine - my family and my freedom - and now you can have yours. Anything you want."
Unfortunately, even though they were citizens, my family still dealt with racism on a near-daily basis. We lived in a predominately Latinx community, but - being bilingual - we were called every name under the book. White kids in my school asked if my parents were illegal immigrants, told me to go back to Mexico - horrible things said by ignorant children.
My dad always taught me to ignore the bullies and focus on the positives. It wasn't until my mom got sick, however, that the idyllic life I'd grown up in fell into the shadows. My dad's three part-time jobs didn't offer insurance, and no company would cover my mom thanks to her cancer. "Pre-existing condition," they called it, practically signing her death warrant. As it turns out, we were lucky enough to have enough money to afford the diagnosis, but it completely depleted our savings.
My mom insisted that she didn't want treatment, that she wanted to let God's will take its path in her life, but - after an argument with my father about it - I found out the truth. We couldn't afford it. We couldn't afford anything. I blamed my father for it at first, blinded by the grief swallowing me every second of every day, because I wanted him to do more - do anything - to help my mother. He took an extra job, my sister dropped out of community college to start working, but cancer treatment eats a hole through your bank account as fast as it rips a hole in your life. Desperate, he turned to extreme measures.
