She remembered the first day she’d entered this classroom, and how angry, depressed and scared she’d been. She’d just been let out of that place she’d been sent to after her arrest for drug possession. Harmony House . . . a fancy name for what was really a jail for teenagers. She’d been taken away from home and forced to spend three months with thieves, gang leaders, addicts . . . when her only real crime had been hanging with people like that. Not that home was such a great place to be either. Her mother was rarely there, and when she was at home, she was drunk. Welfare cheques were spent on booze and who-knew-what-else, and Jenna could recall many nights when she went to bed hungry. So release from Harmony House wasn’t any great relief. She went back to Brookside Towers, the nasty low-income housing development she’d been living in with her mother for two years. Her mother was still drinking, still partying. The apartment was a mess, her life was a mess, and she had to keep that fact a secret from the social workers or she’d be sent into foster care.
