Page 31 of Broken Pieces
I keep walking. Past the gates. Down the road. No destination, just forward motion. The buzz in my bones won’t quit, the heat in my fists still burning holes under my skin.
Third suspension.
That was the nail in the coffin last time.
The Jeffersons hadn’t been perfect, but they weren’t bad. Not saints, but decent. Hot meals on the table. A garage that smelled of oil and gasoline, where I learned how to pull apart an engine without the world crashing down around me. The kind of quiet that didn’t cut too deep.
For a second, I almost believed I could stay.
Then I fucked it up.
One fight. One detention slip and they didn’t hesitate. Handed me the trash bag full of my things and sent me packing. Just a shrug and a “we tried.”
Now I’ve got Dorlores, who is a whole different breed of bitter. The woman never hides the fact that I’m nothing but an easy pay check. Every word from her mouth tastes of resentment.
The thermostat’s locked at freezing, her way of reminding me comfort costs extra. She counts the cereal down to the crumbs, sharpie-marks her name on the milk, bolts the bathroom door after ten as if I’d break in and steal the fucking toilet. Every rule is a knife, and she twists them daily just to watch me bleed.
Now I’ve got to walk into that fucking house and tell her I’ve been suspended again. Another failure stamped across my forehead, another reason for her to remind me I’m a burden she never wanted.
See if she lasts longer than the last one.
And I hate needing any of them.
Hate being passed around from one door to the next, shuffled like a playing card in a rigged game. Strangers collecting kids the way people collect tax deductions, then patting themselves on the back and calling it charity.
But the truth is heavier.
I’m seventeen and I’m exhausted.
My bones ache with it. Survival isn’t strength anymore. It’s just repetition. And it’s killing me slower than anything else could.
I’m two months away from freedom, but it drags out in front of me as if it’s years. Every day stretches thin, a sentence I can’t appeal. I can see the end, taste it, almost touch it, but it still feels out of reach. I can’t outrun the name stamped on me at birth or the hands that taught me violence before they ever taught me love. That shit clings. It brands you, burns you, follows you into every fucking room.
I kick a rock down the sidewalk. It skips once, twice, then rattles hard against the gutter before vanishing into the drain. Gone without a sound. No explanation. No fight. Just erased.
Lucky bastard.
Some days I think about running. Getting out. My own life. No caseworkers, no locked thermostats. Just me, no leash, no one waiting to drag me back.
I picture it sometimes.
Walking until the streets blur into highways, until the houses thin out into dirt roads and sky. Finding a place where no oneknows my name, where I don’t have to explain the bruises on my knuckles or the fire in my chest.
Freedom.
It sounds cheap when I say it in my head, but fuck, I crave it.
Two months might as well be two years, but I keep walking towards that fucking house instead.
It sits at the end of the street, ugly and slumped, peeling paint flaking off in strips, half-dead lawn patchy and yellow. The screen door dangles off one hinge, groaning every time the wind pushes it, a sound that says nobody here gives a shit. The porch sags under nothing but air, still tired, still defeated, like even the wood gave up on holding itself up.
Dolores’s car is parked crooked in the driveway. The passenger mirror clings on with duct tape and spite. That car’s her, in a way—broken, patched with cheap solutions, too stubborn to die.
I stop when I reach the front gate, and just stand here, letting the house stare back at me.
I know what waits inside. I don’t need to step through the door to see it.
She’ll be on her throne.
