from Amanda

This is Amanda. I'm 11. We get to write about things, and I think I can write about why I exist.

I wanted to run away when I was 11. I wanted to do this because nobody loved me. Here are the reasons I knew nobody loved me.

Number one is that my mother had me write on school forms that I was black instead of white, and to use my father's last name instead of my stepfather's. She said it was just because both those things were true, and switching schools was a good time to fix the information. I guess that wasn't too bad, except for one thing. She doesn't like black people and she doesn't like my father, so it was a way to kind of show me she was kicking me out of the family or something, and that I didn't really belong.

Number two is that the kids at school didn't like me. My best friend stopped liking me, and I don't know exactly why, but she wasn't really my friend any more. And the kids in my afternoon class, which was the long one, all afternoon, they really didn't like me. Especially not the black girls. They threw pennies at my back all the time, because they said I was poor. They made fun of my clothes all the time, and my clothes looked really dorky but I couldn't get a job and we couldn't get different clothes for me, so I didn't have a choice about what I wore. They really didn't like my hair, and made fun of that all the time because it wasn't straightened. And they didn't like the fact that I was smart, and answered questions in class, and wasn't in the same reading and math classes they were in. They thought it meant that I was a show off, but it's just the reading and math classes were the ones I was supposed to be in. They teased me and tripped me in the halls and wouldn't talk to me and said I smelled and I was nasty. They were mean in gym, too.

Number three is that my mother never said she loved me unless I said it first. That's how I knew she didn't really love me, she only said it because she was supposed to, and she only let me live with her because she had to. She didn't like to spend time with me.

Also, I knew she didn't really care about whether I was okay, because when I went to camp for a week with school, she didn't come to pick me up when we got back to school on Friday. I waited for hours. We got back around 3, and I waited at school until 4:30, after the teachers said I couldn't keep waiting there. So I walked all the way home, because I couldn't figure out what else to do, and my suitcase and sleeping bag were really heavy. Then my mother got mad at me for not thinking of something else to do, like getting a ride or calling her, except I had no money and no way to call her. She yelled at me for being stupid. She didn't say she was sorry she forgot to come get me, just that I was stupid to walk home. But how else could I have gotten home? They were always forgetting to get me after I had been away. The worst time was one summer, when they forgot to get me from the airport after I had been at my father's for the summer. They wouldn't let me leave the airport, and no one got the phone, and I was there in an office for a couple of hours until they finally got to the airport to get me. Then they made fun of me for crying about it.

Number four is that my father stopped wanting me to visit him any more and he didn't even tell me, just when my mother called about whether he was going to have me come down for the summer, he said he didn't want me any more, and didn't want to have me come visit.

So nobody really loved me.

There was another reason I wanted to run away. My stepfather came back that year. The year before, he was gone somewhere, because my mother divorced him and kicked him out. She did this because she got tired of him hitting her when she was pregnant with my baby brother. But then he came back. And he was doing stuff, and I didn't like it. I don't want to write about that stuff. But that's another reason I wanted to run away.

I made a plan about running away. I wrote down the things I would need, like my bike and a backpack and clothes and a flashlight and some money. But I didn't get money very much, and my mother stopped the plan of paying us for doing chores because the other kids didn't do them, and I would do chores even if I didn't get paid because I didn't like to get yelled at or hit for not doing them. The other kids didn't mind getting yelled at or hit. So she thought the system didn't work, since I would do work whether or not I got money.

But I made the plan. The only problem was, I couldn't figure out how I could go to school and also live by myself. And I didn't have a tent to live in. And I couldn't figure out where I could go. I guess it was more important to keep going to school than to get away, even if I didn't like school. So I decided that if I had lived for eleven years already, and there were only seven years left until college, I could probably stick it out. But that was very hard. So then the other teenagers started coming around then, because they didn't mind so much that nobody loved them. At least, they didn't cry about it. And Jill came after I was there, and she knew how to make friends at school, so she made friends and school wasn't so bad any more. But still nobody loved me, like my birthdays and stuff were always bad. So I just kind of went away inside most of the time, because I guess I couldn't handle being around any more. Too much stuff was too hard for me. And I was too much of a crybaby to have fun at school.

I guess it's a good thing I thought about my plan for running away before I did it. Even though I really wanted to, it was probably very smart that I thought about what would happen if I ran away. The good thing about this is, I don't think the grown up parts were really there yet, when I was making that plan. And they're the ones who kept Jamie from running away, by kind of shutting her up inside, and making her do other things instead. But no one would have been there to stop me, because I was the oldest one inside then. So it's a good thing I stopped to think about the plan, because I didn't have anywhere to go. Not like my sisters, they had friends they could tell about how much they wanted to leave home, so they had somewhere to go. Or to their father's house when they needed somewhere. I didn't have anyone to go to, and I guess I was right that it wasn't a good idea for someone who was too young to get a job to try to live by herself. I couldn't figure out how I would get food, or stuff like that.

I could have been like the kid in My Side of the Mountain, who ran away and lived in the woods, but then I wouldn't have been able to go to school, and that was important to me, because it was the best way to get a good job when I grew up. It was very lonely, because even though I didn't run away, there was nobody who cared about me or would take care of me or keep me safe, and I had nowhere to go. It was hard to wait seven years, all of the time wishing I could think of a different way.