Free Who Owns Kelly Paddik by Beth Goobie Page B

you out when you go to school
, I thought.
    I’d never believed this could happen to me — that I’d get locked up. I’d always wanted to be a normal kid in a normal family like everyone else. Somehow I’d gotten trapped in a life I didn’t want. How had it turned out like this? How had I gotten to be some freak that they had to lock up?
    I sat down on the bed next to my suitcase. The one thing I was glad about was that it was October. That meant I could wear long sleeves and no one could see the skin on my arm. Last week I’d cut my left wrist with broken glass. I was living in a group home then, where it’s easier to get hold of what you need. I’d stolen a Coke from a staff person and smashed the bottle. I’d wanted everything to end then, but I’d messed up. So here I was, alive and locked up.
    When the staff took me to the hospital, they told me that I was a “danger to myself and to others.” Then they told me they were sending me to a place with more staff to help me work things out. That’s the big sob story about how Igot here, with wires on my window and a suitcase to unpack.
    I stared at the stuff in my suitcase. I could feel Jim’s fingerprints all over it. In fact, I felt as if his fingerprints were crawling all over
me
. Slowly I took out my socks and underwear and put them in the dresser. The most important stuff I didn’t unpack, because you couldn’t see it. That was the stuff I kept deep inside me. Only my pet rock heard about those secrets. I’d had them for as long as I could remember — memories of home, things my dad did to me at night when Mom was asleep.
    I worked so hard, all the time, to forget those things. Those memories made my body feel thick, heavy and hard to move. When I thought about what went on at home, I got so scared I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes, if I made myself move or run fast, I could get away from it for a while. When I was a little kid, I used to play a game. I would start at one end of the street and run until I was tired. I would pretend I could go so fast I could leave everything bad behind me. Like a small bird, I would fly up and away from my body forever. Too bad forever doesn’t last very long.
    In here, in this place, there was nowhere to run. I stood at my window and watched yellow leaves blow through the huge iron gate and out into the street. The leaves blurred together as the tears started.
Don’t cry, Kelly
, I told myself.
It doesn’t help, so don’t bother. Just figure out how to get out of this place as fast as you can
.

Chapter Two
    I decided that the first chance I had, I would take off. In the meantime, things would go easier if I pretended that I wanted to be here. So I hung my shirts and jeans in the closet, then looked at the last few things in my suitcase. On the top of a small pile sat an envelope with pictures of my family in it. I hadn’t looked at them in a long time. Underneath were some notebooks full of writing.
    I started to write stories when I was about five years old. When I was seven I decided towrite the story of my life, but I didn’t get very far. One of the oldest notebooks started off with:
I am seven. My mom and dad is big. J and D is smal
. That was about as much as I wanted to say, I guess.
    â€œJ” and “D” are Jolyn and Danny, my sister and brother. I hadn’t seen or talked to them in years, but I thought about them a lot. The last time I saw Jolyn, she was hiding her teeth under her pillow for the tooth fairy. Danny was in diapers. Were they both still living with my mom? Or did they turn out like me and end up in a group home?
    I’d written lots of other stories too, about good kids with happy lives. Those stories went on for pages and pages. It was easy to write stories like that. I could pretend that I was one of those kids. It was a little like looking out a window onto another life. I could get out of mine