RYOT GRL

There’s a hole at the bottom of my converses, and no amount of brown packaging tape and tissues have stopped the water from coming through to my sock. Mum keeps telling me to use cardboard but the only cardboard I can think to use is what they make cereal boxes out of and that’s way too thin. Plus, I don’t like the thought of putting that it my shoe. At least the tissue is soft on my heels. I’m sitting in my 3rd detention of the week, rolling my eyes at the teacher, who is way too emotionally invested in me receiving my punishment for letting all the frogs out of their cages in science class. She wanted me to dissect a living breathing animal. It’s not my fault instead of brown fur and puppy dog eyes, they got stuck with cold blood, bulging unblinking eyes, and a taste for flies. Also, they jump about so much, you can never catch them. Believe me I tried when she told me I had to get each one back in the cage or I would be suspended. I wasn’t bothered about being suspended, but the thought of spending my days off third wheeling my mum and her new boyfriend had me picking them up faster than I could catch them. After the hour-long detention, she sends me on my way, with a curt nod and a smug suppressed smile. Truthfully, I quite like Mrs Hawthorne, she’s a nice teacher. But acting up and refusing to partake in her lessons is the only way I know how to protect my secret. When I get home, my dog Ruben is barking like mad and scratching at the back door to be let out. So, I open the door, and he runs to the end of the garden. I don’t bother calling for my mum, already knowing she’ll be with her new boyfriend. Until, to my surprise she runs in with a plastic bag full of her clothes and 3 pairs of shoes in her hand. “You can’t be serious”, I groan, and she stops, looking around until she spots her blue suitcase on the floor and stuffs her shoes in it “Come on pack your stuff”, she ushers me. “You said this would be the last time”, I yell annoyed. She can’t do this to me again, we’ve barely been in Atlanta for a month, and I was starting to like it here. “What happened Mum?”, I moan. She sighs. “He proposed”. “Just say no it’s not that difficult”, I demand, and she looks at me, pleading with her eyes and it gets me every time. “I can’t believe this”, I shout, making sure to stomp on every step and slam my door as hard as I can. Then I sit on my bed for the next 5 minutes. I wonder if I refused, she could leave me here and I could be adopted by a nice family where there wouldn’t be a crazy mum who makes you pack up and move across the country every couple of weeks. Most of my stuff are still in boxes, so it’s just my clothes and my pictures. “Bye hazelnut”, I say and wave goodbye to my room. I have a thing about naming rooms, since I’ve had so many, I like to name them. It helps me to remember all the places I’ve lived a bit better. I called the room hazelnut because when we first moved in the room was dark beige and the paint was peeling off the walls and falling onto the floor. It had dried up so much they looked like little balls and that’s where the name hazelnut came from. “He’ll be back from work at 9”, she utters, and I nod rolling my eyes. “Quickly get in the car and get Ruben will you”. I do as she asks, whilst she crams our stuff in the back of the car. We’ve got a total of 4 boxes including mine and hers. We’re not sentimental, we can’t afford to be. “Where are we going this time?”, I ask hesitantly, and she shrugs; smiling from ear to ear. “Wherever we want”, she chimes, and I sigh, curling up on the back seat with Ruben on my lap and putting in my headphones at full blast. When I was young, it was fun to move around so much. It was exciting always being in a new place, and constantly living in a different flat or house. We lived in England until I was 11, when she suddenly sprung on me that we should move to America. I didn’t think we would be here long, but 6 years later and we’re still here. It took a while to get used to the different words they use, and how different everything was here. It felt like worlds away from the life I lived in England. My mum likes the road, she likes moving, she doesn’t like to get too comfortable in one place. She was in the foster system growing up, so she moved about a lot from one home to the next. She had me when she was 23, whilst back packing through the West Indies with some guy that she met on her volunteer trip out there. You would think once she had me, she would settle down, but she still hasn’t. I wake up to my mum pushing me awake and I look around to see we’ve stopped at a motel for the night. “They don’t allow dogs, so we’ll have to sneak him in”, and I look at her completely perplexed. “How are we supposed to sneak a great Dane in?”, I hiss, and she shrugs. That’s the most annoying thing about my mum she doesn’t think. She never has. She got Ruben from an adoption centre for my 6th birthday and by then he was so big he was 3 times the size of me. I used to run away from him because I thought he was a giant. We manage to sneak him in by hiding him behind our suitcases which was a lot harder than it sounds since he so twice the size of them. The first thing I do when I got into the motel room is take my makeup off. I feel like it’s peeling off my face, then I brush my teeth and collapse onto the bed with Ruben at the foot of the bed. I’ve got my back turned to my mum, she’s on the other side on her laptop, she’ll be up all night before she decides where we live next. When I awake, she is dressed, with a cup of coffee in her hand. I turn over to my side, hugging Ruben. “Come on we’ve got a long drive ahead of us”. I half-heartedly scream into the pillow. I hate driving, I haven’t got my driving license yet and if I had it my way I never would. “Why where are we going?”. I wait, my whole body tense for those dreaded words to come at whatever state she’s convinced herself will be a good place to live. “Florida”, she exclaims, and I throw my head back on the pillow wishing I could have gone home with Mrs Hawthorne.