Free Writing Our Song by Emma South Page A

and steeled myself to open it.
    Even considering the events of the past year and a half combined with the clues I’d seen in the last few minutes, I never would have guessed what I read in that letter.  That’s why I was so thankful I’d been able to emotionally lock myself down after I’d asked my mom that stupid question.
    Thanks to that harsh, but bitterly-true, fact, I didn’t break down as my eyes scanned over the hastily-written page.  It wasn’t flowery prose by any far stretch of the imagination but, out of everything, there were a few phrases that required special consideration.
    ‘Gone’ ‘not coming back’ ‘rent paid until the end of the month’ and ‘don’t try to find me’ were the words I kept on rereading over and over again.  Finally I put the paper down and stared out of the window for a while.
    I allowed myself to just sit there and hate them for a moment.  That was a ‘safe’ emotion, that wouldn’t bring down my walls, that wouldn’t make me vulnerable again.  I thought back to something my mom had said a lifetime ago, they can only hurt you if you let them.  It was so true.
    I hated how superficial she had become, I hated how he thought he could just throw his money around and do whatever he wanted.  I bet my mom would have come around eventually if it wasn’t for him.
    Rich people had taken away my whole family and everything I loved.  It was because of them I was like this.  When my dad had said you don’t get to be that rich without crushing the dreams of a lot of people on the way up, I had thought he was just talking about the regular old cutthroat world of business.
    Now though, I wondered if he knew what they were really like.  The wealthy today were just as ruthless as the wealthy people throughout history, throwing the poor to the lions for their own entertainment.
    I screwed the letter up and threw it towards the trash, hitting the wall beside my target and scowling at it as it settled on the floor.  This news would require a lot of thinking, but not right now.  Tomorrow I would need to make plans for myself.
    *****
    When I used the computers in the library at school the next day I found that what my mom had done amounted to child abandonment according to Washington state law and I toyed with the idea of reporting her.  After looking further into the process it didn’t seem like such a great idea though.
    Sure, the vague concept of it provided some small measure of satisfaction but what would it accomplish in the end?  A fine that her boyfriend could pay with no problems, and then what?  I’d be put into some kind of foster care.
    With my eighteenth birthday coming up later on in the year it would just be pointless.  No, I would just look after myself.  But I would have to be careful how I did it.
    After the last bell rang I went to the office and asked if there was any paperwork I would need to take home because I was going to be leaving school.  Turned out there was.
    At home I searched high and low until I found something my mom had signed and spent a couple of hours trying to replicate her signature.  When I thought I had it down I did my best to sign and initial in all the right places and then hoped for the best.
    I handed the stack of papers back at the office the next morning and felt my heart jump to my throat when I was called to the counsellor’s office just before lunch.  Waiting outside, there was almost no doubt in my mind they had found some discrepancy in the signatures and my plans to go it alone were going up in smoke as surely as I was sitting there in his waiting room.
    “Beatrice?  Come on in.”
    For what I hoped was the last time and feared was not, I sat in my usual seat next to my usual box of tissues, surrounded by the usual clocks.
    “So talk,” Eli said.
    “About what?”
    “You know what.  I heard you’re leaving us.  What’s all that about?”
    “Oh.  Yeah.  We’re moving,” I said.
    “Not too far away, I