Ask Me Why I Hurt Read Online Free PDF

when she is alone on the freeway?” I promised to have them changed soon. “Change them now,” Dad said, and went back in the house.
    Dad listened to the stress in my voice. I had pulled him from bed. He waited until it all came out. “Son, remember that time when you were little and your sister bonked you on the head with a hammer?”
    “How could I forget?” I said, laughing.
    “And what did I tell you?”
    “I should have ducked.”
    “That’s right. Not because she was right to hit you. But life isn’t always fair or easy, and the sooner you learn to handle it, the better off you will be. Now, you wanted this, right? Then figure out what you can do to make it work. You got that smart wife of yours. Isn’t Amy an adviser on this van?”
    “She is.” When her father gave us the gift from their family trust, we had created an advisory board. I had remembered how important her father’s questions had been and asked several professionals to sit on a board to give us guidance and ask those hard questions. Amy was now on the board, as were several hospital and social service administrators.
    “Then why are you talking to me and not talking to her?” he asked pointedly.
    Good point. Because I’m embarrassed to tell her how horribly it went, I thought.
    “That’s what an adviser is for,” he said. “They give advice. But you got to ask for it.” He waited a moment. “Don’t be too proud to ask for help, son.”
    “Thanks, Dad.”
    He chuckled before hanging up. I pictured him and mom in their house in Gilbert, a home with its neat rows of family photographs in the hallway, the hobby shelf with my mom’s miniature adobe houses, and the little guest room with my childhood bed. Whenever I thought of my dad, I would remember Kremmling, Colorado, where my sister, Stephanie, was born. It always came back in the bright memories of childhood: the times spent fishing at the lake, the gentle jokes at the dinner table about our Lutheran gringo dad marrying a Catholic Mexican girl. We were proud of how my parents were so in love they weren’t going to obey the rules of the time. My dad had always lived by his own heart. When I was growing up, I wanted to be just like him.
    “Amy?” She was barely awake. “Sorry that took so long.” Icrawled into bed, wearing my pajamas, my breath clean. I curled against her back. I smelled her clean damp hair, and I felt a lot better.

    The next few days were a firestorm of activity. We ordered many of the supplies we had found ourselves needing, including clipboards. At home I began regularly running problems by Amy. She immediately had an answer to the laundry problem: disposable paper gowns. It was a genius thought, and I ordered them immediately.
    Jan was busy creating new intake forms. She had reviewed dozens on the Internet and found none to her liking. Not one, she told me, was appropriate for a homeless child. There were intake forms for regular children, the kind that parents fill out, and there were forms for adults. But none was for an unaccompanied teenager. So she was making her own. One morning I went into our offices at HomeBase and found ten different samples waiting on my rickety swivel chair. “What do you think of this one?” Jan asked, handing me a form. At the top was a place for the kid’s name. The first question was, “Where are you currently living?” Under the answer section the choices read: “Street,” “Shelter,” “Friends,” and so on. The second question was, “How long have you been homeless?” On down the list the questions went, from abuse at home to depression and suicide attempts.
    “This is great,” I said.
    “Can we use them?” she asked.
    I thought for a moment. “Sure. But let’s run them by administration first.”
    Jan frowned a little but didn’t say anything. It occurred to me that I was used to working with bureaucracies while Jan was not. I didn’t want to upset anyone in administration by using intake forms it