A LOT OF PEOPLE BELIEVE that the moment that you're born, your life begins. The second that the artificial light that shines down from the hospital ceiling hits your eyes, your life has started, and you've become a person with responsibilities and duties that you'll have to spend forever taking care of. You'll spend the next few years learning how to talk, to smile, to cry, to walk, and then, you become a teenager and you'll attend a school that teaches you absolutely nothing, and on your eighteenth birthday, when you legally become an adult, you're thrown out onto your ass into the real world which, of course, you aren't prepared for. Everything, from the day of your birth to the day that you die, has been mapped out for you since your first tears, and you don't really get a say in anything.
But for Kody Vandal, things have always seemed different. He believes that his life didn't start then. Sure, he believes that his life was planned from the beginning and, again, he doesn't have any other choice than to blow out the candles on his birthday every year and accept the fact that, yes this is his life and he can't do anything about it. But Kody Vandal does not believe that his life started in the hospital when he took his first real breath of air, or in the carpeted living room of his mother's childhood home where he took his first steps, or even when he threw the sugary cereal that his mother had lovingly put in a colorful bowl off of his high chair and yelled out his first word ("papa!"), to which his parents responded with surprised gasps, teary eyes, and affectionate cuddling.
No, Kody Vandal thinks that his life really, truly began during the summer before his tenth birthday, when his parents sat him down at the dinner table (they would've sat his baby sister down as well, if she had even been old enough to understand what the conversation was about) and told him that they were moving out of Hawkins, the only town he ever knew. He believes that his life started when it changed, when the normalcy of his life was stripped away and he was left confused and tired and feeling alone.
