She passed her Matura with distinction just before her seventeenth birthday and enrolled in the University of Graz. Ines moved in with her boyfriend and went to school and her mother...went back to her father.
They fought about it for days. Ines couldn't believe that her mother would willingly return to her husband, even though he claimed that rigorous counseling and therapy had alleviated his anger issues and made him a more ideal husband. Days turned to weeks, and Ines, having said some things to her mother (in particular, that she hoped he would kill her this time to teach her a lesson) that she would soon regret but was too angry to apologize for, did not call home or speak to either of her parents for the duration of the term. Ines threw herself into her schooling, attending every lecture and taking on every optional endeavor possible. In the end, she made surprisingly few friends, but developed a small social circle for herself – drinking buddies, more or less, and a few boys she dated for brief, fizzling affairs that all ended up about as well as her relationship with her first boyfriend.
She was a staunch, vocal supporter of the Austrian Domestic Violence Bill - which came into law while she was still studying – hoping that it would bolster the support network for families like her own and give her mother more options in the (inevitable, in her mind) event that her father relapsed.
Imagine the most awkward school holiday possible, amplify it tenfold, and it becomes a fair approximation of Ines' time at home. The first true holiday was the worst, as she came home after a period of many months, during which she had no contact with either of her parents. Ines loved her family - for being her family, if nothing else - but she could not forgive her father and had no idea how to deal with what she saw as nothing but self-destructive behavior from her mother. Their relationship stilted, the calm between them uneasy, Ines eventually chose to look for her own flat, securing jobs where she could to alleviate the financial pressure on a family she didn't care to be indebted to as she continued her education.
Things did not improve. They didn't get any worse, either, but Ines' mother stayed with her father and Ines stayed in school. She succeeded because she was devoted, not intelligent. Brains helped, Ines realized, but it was only in applying herself, being her own manager, that she was able to perform so admirably.
It was likely her strained relationship with her parents (with her father, she reasoned; she had no problem with her mother other than a desire not to see her hurt and increasing frustration with her inability to see the danger she was in) that fostered Ines' desire to pursue education outside of Austria. The country suddenly seemed too small and claustrophobic for her, and she had no desire to stay within walls, no matter how arbitrary and self-imposed they were. She ended up at Carnegie Mellon, making an identity for herself through sheer effort, ability to juggle two academic faculties at once as well as managing multiple assignments and obligations outside of the classroom.
In the end the experience proved itself quite useful for her: at home Ines had trouble differentiating herself from her past. She was too hung up on her relationship with her family; she let her past situations define her and projected herself more as a series of causes and family mistakes than individual qualities. It was easier for Ines to develop her own identity, but it's so hard to kill old habits, and so easy to put up fronts to keep yourself in a safe, stable position. She was happier as a graduate student than she'd ever been before, however, and it helped her realize that it is, on occasion, okay to be happy.