Darlene was not kind. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. She was cruel in the specific, daily, grinding way that doesn’t leave marks that teachers notice but leaves marks everywhere else.

She hit me with a wooden spoon. Not once, not when I did something wrong. Regularly. The way you’d swat at a fly. Casual. Like it cost her nothing. The handle of that spoon cracked eventually and she replaced it with a new one from the Dollar General. I remember standing in the aisle while she picked it out.

She made me sleep on a mattress on the floor in a back room with no door, just a curtain. She told me every single day, sometimes multiple times, that my mother had sold me because I was bad.

“Your mama didn’t want you, Jolene. You were rotten. She got eight hundred dollars for you and she spent it before the week was out.”

$800. I was five years old and my mother sold me for $800. That is less than what Curtis paid for our couch.

I believed Darlene. I believed I was rotten. I believed my mother looked at me and saw something wrong and decided $800 was a fair trade.

—

I lived with Darlene until I was eleven. That’s when a neighbor finally called somebody. I don’t know what triggered it. I don’t know if they heard something or saw something or just finally decided they’d looked away long enough.

CPS came. Darlene was arrested. I went into foster care.

I’m not gonna walk you through every foster home. There were four. Some were okay. None of them felt like mine. I aged out at eighteen with a garbage bag of clothes and a GED and the bone-deep belief that I was fundamentally unlovable because my own mother had sold me for grocery money.

I ruined two relationships before I was twenty-five. Not on purpose. I just couldn’t let anyone get close. Every time someone said “I love you,” my brain said “Your mama didn’t want you.” Every time someone left the house I was sure they weren’t coming back.