It was kind of a rough time in my life, as you can imagine, since, well, I was hitchhiking. I had maybe fifty dollars worth of stuff to my name and I needed to get out of town. I was stupid, but I was young, just turned nineteen. I should have gone to somebody for help. A shelter, maybe even the cops. My mother threw me out the year before, right when I enrolled in community college. She said I wasn’t her problem anymore now that I was grown. To be brutally honest, she’d never been much of a mother. I wore hand-me-downs and second hand clothes while she wore designer fashions, drove a sleek German luxury car and strutted around town like she was queen shit of fuck mountain. Me? I had to make due with what I had. So I ended up with the bad kids in school. It kinda happens naturally when you’re poor. When you’re broke all the time, even the goths don’t want you to sit at their table. I had a job, but it didn’t matter. I don’t know, maybe it’s different in big cities or something, but in the little one stoplight town I came from, there was a clear social structure and I didn’t fit in the good parts of it, even if I spent my whole paycheck on clothes, trying to fit in.
