Memory 2 Week 5

When I turned 13, my parents checked me out of school in the middle of World History.
We hadn't gotten yearbooks yet, but the girls in my class crowded around me and started crying.
It was the last time I saw that school.
It was May. It was raining.
We sat on dull hardwood floors on empty pizza boxes while the moving men unloaded into different rooms. There were three upstairs and a basement still above ground.
The horizon broke with four mounds of dirt in our backyard, and a empty park filled with oak trees
where the neighborhood hid plastic eggs on Easter, begging four year-olds to fight with teenagers over candy.
I shared a bathroom with my sister. At night, we would scramble to the vents and whisper to each other about how mom wouldn't let us stay up to watch Nick @ Nite because it was too adult.
And on the weekends, I would count footsteps across her room and mine, making sure that my room was bigger.
One summer afternoon, I perched myself on my desk chair, mulling over multiplication tables in a bridge workbook, eavesdropping about my father.
That would be years before he sat us down on another summer afternoon, in a different town, and clipped the fraying thread of our family.