September 14–16 Claire It was the morning of the day I decided to leave. I wanted to get from the pick-up/drop-off zone of the parking lot, where I was currently standing, to the glass doors to Haven High, but the steady stream of cars heading into the A-lot was making it impossible. I was thinking about my worries, counting them like beads on a rosary. Okay, so I’d never actually seen a rosary before, and I wasn’t sure what you actually did when you counted on one, but I’d heard about it in a song once. I imagined my rosary like one of those slidey-bead toys in doctors’ waiting rooms, where you move the bead from one side of a twisty wire to the other. Bead one: I was going to be late to class, because I went to school with a bunch of overprivileged white kids rocking out in new Toyotas and clearly not yielding to pedestrians. But that was just the beginning. I tried to pull the short sleeves of my pink T-shirt away from my armpits without someone noticing.
