By Jennifer DeMotta

Part 2
At sixteen, I still didn’t have my driver’s license, but I’d driven before. Sometimes at night, when my mother was tired and we had to keep driving to put distance between us and him, she let me drive. Only on those long, flat high ways in places like Iowa[...]

By Jennifer DeMotta

Part 1
Last year on my fifteenth birthday, I stood before my birthday cake, my face warm and lit up by fifteen pastel candles. Pink letters spelled out “Happy Birthday Elle.” I took a deep breath, anxiously thinking of wishes. Before I settled on a wish, my mother hung up the phone she’d been cradling on her shoulder and jumped up from the table.[...]