Sliding Into Home Read Online Free PDF

bother to tell her about it. Instead I just ran away. I left the house when she wasn’t paying attention and spent the night getting drunk on Mickey’s malt liquor in the Mervyn’s parking lot with no intention of going home again. A few hours in I was pretty hammered, and a friend thought I would sober up with some coffee. No luck. That just made me more wired and gave me a stomachache. It was a disaster.
    At the end of the night when the party was over I had nowhere to go but home. My big plan to run away didn’t even last the night.
    Even when I was in elementary school, I’d dreamed about running away. I would get a couple people in on my plan and we would talk about saving our money and getting on a bus to leave town. We weren’t trying to run away from anything specific; we were more interested in running toward something. We wanted to be adults. We wanted adventure. It would take us weeks to save our pennies, and when we finally had our money together we would all chicken out at the last minute.
    This time was sort of the same. I was going to run away to make my own decisions and be my own boss, but when all the other kids went home, I had no choice but to do the same.
    My mom was very mad when I arrived home, of course. She yelled, grounded me, and threatened to never let me see certain friends again. I just stood there and listened and showed no emotion. I didn’t care what she had to say. The bottom line was that I was back under her rules and already plotting my next escape.
    One of the next parties I was invited to was down at the beach. Based on my recent behavior, my mom wasn’t so sure I should go.
    “Pleeeeeeeease,” I begged, knowing full well that I was going to go no matter what she said.
    “Are the girl’s parents going to be there?”
    “Of course.” (Fingers crossed behind my back.)
    “Okay, but I’m picking you up at ten P.M .,” she said. “No funny business.”
    It was a camping party and everyone—boys and girls—had tents and was allowed to spend the night. Again, we were all drinking (it was the latest middle school fad), and for most kids it didn’t matter because they could just sleep it off. I still had my curfew, so my fun had to end early.
    When my mom came to pick me up she could tell that I had been drinking. She could smell it on my breath, and she was furious.
    “That’s it!” she screamed. “You are spending the night in juvenile hall.”
    My younger brother, who was probably ten years old at the time, was in the car and he was freaking out. I, on the other hand, was cool as a cucumber. Maybe the alcohol blurred my ability to fear my mom’s threats, but I wasn’t scared of her. We pulled up to our local juvie and she yanked me out of the car and dragged me inside.
    “Officer!” my mom yelled. “I just picked up my daughter andshe’s been drinking. She’s twelve years old and I want you to keep her.”
    The two cops behind the desk looked at each other in amazement. The expressions on their faces said it all:
Who is this crazy lady and what are we supposed to do with this kid?
    Colin saw their guns and was even more freaked out. But there was nothing they could do. The place was full of real criminals. They were never going to keep me there. The officers took me in the back and tried to scare me by threatening me, and then they let me go.
    “What are you doing?” my mom said. “Aren’t you going to keep her?”
    Uh, no, Mom.
    She drove me home and that was the end of it. She was losing control of me and she knew it.
    It was a slow but steady process. A missed curfew here, a night of drinking there. Day by day, as I made my way through the seventh grade, I was turning into the kind of kid who would become totally uncontrollable, and I could see my mother unraveling.
    Things took another turn for the worse when I expanded my social network outside of school and found an older crowd of people who wanted to hang out with me. My walk home from school wasn’t