The smell of my childhood did not resemble lemonade stands or fresh laundry. It smelled like hot asphalt after rain, truck exhaust clinging to the morning air, and detergent so strong it made my nose sting. It settled into the seams of my clothes and refused to leave, even when I washed everything twice on the long cycle. I grew up in Riverton, Ohio, a working class town with cracked sidewalks and more pawn shops than parks. People said it was a place you passed through, not a place you stayed, and yet staying was exactly what the world expected of me.
My name is Jack Fulton. I am eighteen years old and the son of a sanitation worker. My mother, Denise, spent eleven years on the back of a city garbage truck. People said that job suited her because she was always tough, but they did not know the truth. She had studied to become a radiology technician before her fiancé, my father, fell from a faulty scaffolding at a housing development and never came home. The bills swallowed her dreams. The city job saved our apartment, but it cost her the life she once imagined.
