Small towns have the tendency to eat you whole if you’re not careful. They’re full of small people with small minds and if you don’t fit their norm, well, then you’re shit out of luck.

How do I know? I’m Kylie. Sixteen years old. Been here all my miserable life and watched this place eat up every bit of originality my parents and older sisters had and then spit it out like it was too hard to swallow, like it didn’t suit its tastes.

My parents were high school sweethearts. Sort of, I guess. They met in high school, the very same high school I go to today. They started dating in high school. They just never broke up. I’m not sure they’re entirely right together. I mean, they work and all, but my mom never bothered to explore her options. After high school, my dad joined the Navy and got to travel around the world working as an electrician on his ships. He got to see things. He got to meet new people. He got to learn things. What did my mom do? She waited by the phone for his calls. She literally has a photo album from the time that he was away featuring like six pictures of herself next to the phone. Like we’re supposed to be wowed by that? She didn’t go to college. She didn’t leave the town. She stayed here. She got a job as an aide in the elementary school. She waited for him. That’s it.

She could’ve been more, but she doesn’t believe me. She just got used to this place. She got used to being the big fish in the small pond—making it out of high school without getting pregnant was a feat, and having a long-distance fiancé was damn near exotic.

My dad came back and they got married. They had the four of us. They kept trying for a boy and when I popped out with a vag, well, that was it for them. They stopped trying. No boys. What a let down, you know?

My sisters were always my idols. When we were growing up, I thought they were so cool, so artistic, so fancy, but as I get older and older, I’m starting to see the life being drained out of them. They’re not as vibrant as they used to be, and I think that’s partly because they’ve never bothered to expand their horizons.

My oldest sister, Casey, is nine years older than me. She was a true teen of the 90’s. She wore big flannel shirts, ripped jeans, docs, and pierced her nose. She listened to Pearl Jam and Nirvana and taught me that all feelings are valid and all feelings deserve to be felt. She showed me what it was to be angry at the injustices that life throws around and she always aspired to be an environmentalist. And then she graduated from high school and went to the state college an hour and a half away. She got married to her own high school sweetheart and moved back to town. She became a CPA and started getting excited about things like 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight and the girl I grew up wishing to be was gone. In her place was this woman with wilting hair, dark spots under her eyes, and the stunted imagination of a teenager.

Caitlin’s story isn’t much different from Casey’s. They’re three years apart and where Casey was alternative, Caitlin was mainstream. She loved pop music, makeup, and going to the mall. She always wore the latest fashion trends and dressed me up in her clothes on Thursdays after school. She was so beautiful and she made me feel beautiful too. She gave me confidence. She showed me what it was like to develop my own style and be true to myself in all ways. And then she graduated from high school and went to college with Casey. She studied education and spent some extra time there getting her master’s degree. She came back to town, even though she could’ve gone anywhere, and started teaching in the very same elementary school that my mom works in. Now she’s all wrapped up in the drama of the school community. Did you know that teachers in our town just gossip about each other endlessly? They all seem so two-faced. They act like they’re best friends and then bitch about each other behind their backs. I can’t even look some of my teachers in the face now. And Caitlin has gotten sucked up into that world. She has Tupperware parties with them, drinks wine with them, gathers up all of their secrets, and saves them to shoot off at them just to hurt them later on.

Carly is a little different from Caitlin and Casey. She’s only a year and a half older than me, so we’ve been together for our whole lives. She was always so artistic. My mom gave her old camera when she was ten and she started taking pictures all over the place. She learned how to develop her own film in our basement and then started painting the pictures she took on the walls down there. When she ran out of space, she painted murals in our bedrooms. When she ran out of space, my dad got her canvases from the art store and she filled one after another after another. I really looked up to her. She had an easy, flowy way about her and I thought she was going to be famous someday. I thought she would be big and brave and leave this place.

And she did for a while. She went to art school in the city and I thought she was going to flourish. I hoped that she would because that would mean that I could too, but then she started doing drugs. She was popping pills and drinking heavily just to get herself through her classes, and we had a nightmare moment when her best friend called our house in the middle of the night sobbing. Carly had taken too much and collapsed. She wet herself. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t even see. She couldn’t do anything. They had to take her to the hospital and have her stomach pumped.

She’s back home now and the light in her eyes has gone out. She refuses to touch her paints. She won’t go out into the fields with me to sit and admire the flowers and listen to the crickets as the sun goes down. She won’t do anything. She just lays in her bed sobbing. Every day, I look at her, and I see that she is less and less of the girl she used to be.

It scares me, because there’s a good chance that I’ll end up like the rest of them. There’s a good chance that I’ll leave town for a little while and come floating back, yearning for the familiar. I don’t want to. I want to get out of this town so badly. Sometimes I pretend that I’ve run away. I come out to the edge of our property—our house is the last in our development—and I sit on a rock in the dying light, surrounded by fireflies, feeling like a stranger and looking at all of the houses in the neighborhood with their lights on, with the miserable and colorless families inside, and pray to God that I’ll be the one that gets away.