The Road Home: Chapter 1

We are sitting outside the school building. My mother is in the driver’s seat and I’m still buckled in, wishing she would just pull us away from here and never come back. My heart is pounding so loud and so fast, I can barely hear the engine idling.

Outside the safety of this car there are hundreds of kids streaming in through the wide double doors of the school, smiling teachers waving to them, greeting them, schmoozing with them. I watch them, searching their faces, hoping against desperate hope that maybe someone, anyone, will look a little familiar. No one does. I look at their school bags, their shoes, their hair, and worry about my own.

Not only am I new to this school, but I will be hopelessly uncool here. I have all the wrong stuff, even if it was all just fine “back home.” Whatever that means, a voice hisses in my head. My backpack is not the right brand, I’m wearing sneakers and these girls are not, and my hair, despite my best attempts at taming it, is frizzed to its finest in the late-August humidity. I shudder.

“It’s going to be okay,” my mother says, squeezing my ice-cold hand. “It always is.”