I wasn’t raised to be a superstitious person. My mother was a lawyer, all business. She taught me from a very young age that nothing existed without proof. I believed her, and that was the biggest mistake of my life.
By the time I turned ten, all of my friends were hung up on Friday the thirteenth, and stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. But unlike them, I didn’t believe in these urban myths. They were afraid to even hold a mirror for fear of dropping it, as many ten year olds are, but not me. I was curious, and as they say, curiosity killed the cat. I kind of deemed myself a Myth Buster, like the TV show I was so fond of, only with superstitions. My mother encouraged me, thought it was cute. If only she knew.
I went around town, stepping on every crack in every sidewalk. I broke the big mirror in my room into pieces so tiny you’d think they had turned back into grains of sand. Whenever I could get my hands on salt, I would throw it over my shoulder. After school, I would go to the local construction site and walk under every ladder. It was after about a year of these seemingly harmless experiments that things turned sour.
It all started one day when I returned from walking under the ladders at the construction site. Our next door neighbor, Mrs. Sydney, was standing on our front door gesturing wildly to a police man.
“The girl who lives here, you have to do something about her! She’s throwing mirrors out her window like she’s afraid of her own reflection! Her mother tells me she spends her time at a construction site walking under ladders! She belongs at a mental facility, I swear!”
“Ma’am, calm down,” the policeman placed his hand on Mrs. Sydney’s shoulder. “We’ll evaluate her for mental issues. You have no more need to be involved in this.”
And thus began my childhood in a mental facility, a perfectly healthy girl who was only a bit eccentric. I grew out of this phase within a few years, but its repercussions stuck with me for life. I got a scholarship into Harvard law school early when I turned seventeen, hoping to follow in my mother’s footsteps. But when they looked over my record, they withdrew my scholarship. They didn’t need anyone who had spent so much time in a mental facility, they said. I tried to get job after job, but my choices were limited more and more. I grew old working at McDonalds on minimum wage with no family to call my own. When I was a child, I didn’t believe in bad luck or superstitions, but I was wrong. A lesson to all children, don’t walk under ladders.
