no place like homeless

We came back to our unfurnished home in Palookaville. We were not supposed to be there. My parents had defaulted on the land contract, so it had reverted back to the previous owners. The elctricity had been turned off, so we kept food in a styrofoam cooler. We used flashlights to find our way to the bathroom at night. We basically lived out of the master bedroom because my parent's old bed was still in there. When my mother sold the bed, we set up lawn chairs; the kind that fold out like a chaise. If you put a blanket on them, they're pretty comfortable. We slept in our clothes. I went back to my old school. It was as if I never left. Nobody knew I was living in a house we had previously abandoned. Nobody knew I was eating from a cooler and sleeping on a lawn chair. The only difference was when the teacher called for the kids to come up and get an orange ticket emblazoned with the words,"FREE LUNCH", I had to join the line.
My mother tried to get her former job back. I don't know if they had already replaced her, were on a hiring freeze, or she had a bad work record, but they refused. I came home from school one day and a strange car was in the driveway. My mother drove a shiny new red car. This car was an old faded dirty red car with a hatchback. I was afraid to go in the house so I lingered outside. Finally mom called me in.
"Who's here?" I asked.
"Nobody" she said as if there wasn't an old faded dirty red car with a hatchback in our driveway.
"Who's car is that?"
"Well, it's ours."
"Where's your new car?"
"I sold it. We needed the money. This one will be fine for now."
I didn't know it at the time, but the car had been repossessed. The beat up car had been purchased for my mother by her friend's husband, with whom she had been having an affair even before we went to Tennessee.
She started to be gone alot. At first she enlisted a teenage girl from the neighborhood to watch me. Her name was Cheryl. She wore stoner chick clothes, like tight jeans and the cropped concert t-shirts of bands like AC/DC, Ted Nugent and Journey. She wore oversized flannel shirts for jackets. Her eyes were rimmmed in back eyeliner. Cheryl lived in a crazy house down the road. It was full of feral stoner children who had several different mothers and fathers. There was always some kind of activity going on. It usually involved screaming, heavy metal music and long haired teenage boys with no shirts on. Cheryl talked to me like I was an adult.
"You know, I was in love with Ted for so long. But all we ever did was get high and screw. I would go to his house and we'd smoke a joint and then we'd fuck and then we would smoke another joint and then I would go home." she giggled and threw her hands up, "It was like, Buzz, Bed, Buzz, Bye!"
I never knew any person other than parents who'd actually done it.
Soon, babysitting funds were not in the budget, so I came home alone to the empty house and sat there until I fell asleep.
One night the stoner boys broke in through the sliding glass door. I lay motionless and listened to them whisper.
"It's empty."
"I thought they were livin' here. Aren't they livin' here?"
"Yeah, the little sister comes here after school."
"What the fuck? Is this their food? In a cooler?"
"Where's their shit?"
"I don't know, man..."
They came around the corner and I'm sure were surprised to see me sleeping in a lawn chair in the middle of the living room. They surrounded the chair. I pretended to sleep.
"I say we fuck her."
"You're a sick bastard. That's a little kid."
"She's got some titties, man. I've seen 'em pokin' outta her shirt."
"No way, man. that's a little girl, man!"
"I'm fuckin' her! I didn't break in here for nothin'!"
"Leave her alone, man. C'mon, let's get the fuck out of here."
They left with our cooler.
When my mom got home and realized the sliding glass door was broken and the cooler was gone, she went to a pay phone and called the police. The police had received a complaint from the previous owners about our squatting, so they asked us to leave the house. We put our suitcases in the hatchback and slept the remainder of the night in the car in a parking lot. I didn't have to go to school the next day. I spent some nights at my Grandmother's house. We spent some nights on friend's couches. We spent some nights in the car. I started to spend weekends with my big sister at her boyfriend's house. My dad would call and we would talk about me coming to Houston for Christmas. I was going to fly on a plane all by myself. I only saw my mother when she drove me to school and in the afternoon when she picked me up and dropped me off at the place where I was to sleep. Most days she picked me up, she was already drunk.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Kath?"

"When I come to Houston, can I just stay with you?"