“No! Please don’t burn that!” I screamed while my father threw my grandmother’s handmade quilt into a flaming barrel behind our house.

I started from absolute zero. I moved into a local youth shelter, sharing a cramped, drafty room with three other runaway girls. To survive, I took a grueling graveyard shift at a grimy highway gas station, making a miserable $9.50 an hour. I studied under the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights behind the cash register, fighting continue reading …