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I’ll give you three guesses why I’d rather live in a library than the foster home provided for me by Child Services.
Statistically, I knew there were good people in the system. Men and women who wanted nothing more than to share their residence with children who have lost everything. But I wasn’t one of those statistics.
The first people who took me in, did it for the money. They provided little in terms of food, and after going hungry one time too many, I stole a sandwich and got kicked out for it.
In the second foster home, I had a lock on my door. I hadn’t understood why until someone tried to creep into my room. It was the middle of the night, and everyone was supposed to be sleeping.
In my third and last home, the violence escalated quickly. We were having supper one night, and I corrected my foster dad about a random fact without thinking. I got slapped for my efforts, and because I was so much smaller than he was, it threw me across the room.
I went out the window with a black eye that night and never looked back, because feeling hopeless beats having to sleep with a Swiss knife under your pillow any day of the week.
Or so I thought.
Being homeless made me understand how easily I had it up to that point.
How do I describe living in the streets to someone who’s never gone through it?
It’s a nightmare, a complete hell on earth.
The area we were in wasn’t the best, so every night I slept behind a giant garbage container with one eye open and never let my guard down for more than an hour at a time.
I got beat up twice and was almost raped once by a John who mistook me for a streetwalker. All this within a two-week span.
You’re wondering why I didn’t just go back or say something to the social worker heading my case. Better yet, you would like to know why I didn’t ask for help.
Well, I did, but she didn’t believe me. What were the odds of me getting three bad homes in a row? Nobody could be that unlucky, right? Ergo, I must have been the problem.
They branded me a child with special needs (whatever that meant), and nobody would take me in after that.
So, yeah.
I didn’t blame her. There were hundreds of thousands of cases like mine, and only a handful of people were willing to take us on. Even if she’d believed me, she would have just placed me in one of those group homes, and I’d rather stay here and risk getting killed than go there.
Three weeks after I ran away, I was hunched into a ball, verging on despair, when my mother’s belongings fell out of my pocket.
Don’t ask me how it happened because I don’t know. I kept everything in a zipped-up compartment to make sure I never lost them. How the content ended up on the ground where I was crouching was a mystery to me.
But there they were, my mother’s set of keys to the library.
I stared at them for a long time before mouthing “thank you”.
The very next day, I took the bus to her old workplace and spent hours going through its many nooks and crannies.
On my third pass through the large building, I discovered the library’s attic. The place was tiny, and smelled ancient, but I didn’t care. I’ve been calling it home since.
I turned on the computer and surfed the web after the guard finished his rounds and left.
A couple of hours later, a familiar notification flashed on my screen and the picture of an elegant man appeared.
Winthrop Financials donate one million dollars to help children in need.
I went through the newspaper article and memorized the name of the charity before taking out the laptop I’d “borrowed” from the library. I logged onto a proxy server and launched the open-source operating system to access the Charity’s financial information.
If you’re wondering how a thirteen-year-old would know how to do all of this, well, I’m not sure how to explain it, but I’ll try.
My parents raised me to hoard knowledge from the time I could walk. I wasn’t a genius like my father, nor was I as well read as my mother. But they made sure odds were in my favor.
This, of course, was met with great enthusiasm growing up. An intelligent kid was still a kid.
