Please Take Me Home by Crystal Angevine
The winter air is rather sharp, ripping at my nose and throat every time I breathe in. I glance at my phone. 5:30. Someone should be to the school soon to pick me up. Living thirty minutes away from school after six years of being able to walk home has left me bitter.
My good friends know I’m currently homeless, but they don’t know I wait over an hour after everyone else has left, outside in the middle of January, before I get to go back to the dingy cheap hotel room with my parents, nephew and two cats. I’m too proud to tell them. It’s been two weeks of this, going into the third. You’d think I would get over myself and ask for some companionship. But no. Go pride go!
No one except my close friends, my teachers and the school administration knows I have no home. I feel weird enough answering questions about whether we have found a house, let alone support the conversation if my friends decided they had to sit with me. Hell, not like anyone would guess my overall situation anyway. Might as well keep this on the DL.
Intro:
There is a certain comfort in going home after a long day at school or work and knowing that, even though the windows are a wee bit drafty and the heater sounds like an airliner taking off every five minutes, you have all the creature comforts we humans adore: warmth, our own beds, all the food and music we can devour, family. Sure, we say home is where the heart is. But a house… a roof above us in cold winter months and searing summer days is one of the many comforts we often for granted. Think of a homeless person you’ve seen. Ninety percent of us just pictured raggedy, unkempt men in sleeping bags on O street who, we assume, brought this on themselves in some way or another. However, there are actually people who have been upstanding renters, paying their rent on time, whose landlords don’t pay their mortgages. Those people had no hand in their own fates, and just this knowledge challenges the stereotypes we so often see, as exhibited in Please Take Me Home by Crystal Angevine.
I’m staring at my phone, killing battery. After all, I’m a teenager. I live and die by this thing. My heart is invested in words upon a screen. I can’t really move my fingers right now anyway, since my gloves got shoved unceremoniously into some box waiting in storage to be unpacked when we find a house. I’ll work on my homework when I can feel my fingers again, not on this frigid bench I reside.
“Crystal? What are you still doing here?” The voice startles me, and belongs to Ms. James, my guidance counselor and one of the most helpful people in this entire mistake.
I stammer more than a little in my response. “Uh… I am waiting for my ride. Mom didn’t get off work until a little while ago.”
“But it’s freezing out here,” she says. “Why are you waiting outside?”
“It’s not that cold. I mean, sure a polar bear’s gonads are liable to fall off in this chill, but I’ve got a good coat.” I smile at her reassuringly.
“Are you out here late every afternoon?” she inquires. I shake my head vigorously. “Crystal?”
“What?” I smile innocently.
“Are you out here late every afternoon?”
“Only sometimes.” A fallacy. Please don’t pick that up on your super counselor fallacy radar or whatever. Please.
“You can always hang out in the counseling office and do work or something. I’m here late eveyr night for student council anyway,” Ms. James offers. My mom pulls into the parking lot and glides to a stop smoothly before us.
As I stand, I offer reassurance, “Thank you for the offer, but I probably won’t need it after today. Thanks, though! Have a good night!”
Five minutes later, Mom asks, “Were you waiting outside for long?”
“No. I just got out there. I was working with teachers.” Another lie. I don’t want people to worry where it isn’t due. They have bigger and sometimes better things to worry about than a wayward kid.
“You still have a lot of homework?”
“Yeah. I haven’t gotten very far on catching up. But Ms. Mitchell said I got a 98 on that paper. She seemed kind of surprised I got it in just in time,” I comment.
“Not many kids would be so forthcoming with their problems and still be prompt in turning in assignments. A lot of them would just use it to slack off,” Mom says.
“Yeah well, they’re stupid and I don’t like them.”
Mom grins at me. I stare blankly out at the countryside on the road leading out of town. Darkened, dingy hotel room floor for a bed. I can dig this. At least it’s a roof.
It’s kind of humorous a bit that no one knows. I was missing for a week and a half and people asked. I just told them that something came up in the family. Nothing big. No one died at least, so I can at least say that the days were not total losses.
The next day at school, Mrs. Estrada, my theater mentor, Mr. Kaiser, the technical director, and two student assistant directors for the play I am stage managing and acting in pull me into an office.
Mrs. Estrada, my mentor, leans forward with her elbows on her desk. I stand in front of her and the other three awkwardly, unsure of what to do with myself. “Crystal, we need to know if we need to find someone else to do your job, since you haven’t been here.”
“I’m sorry? You know why I haven’t been able to be here,” I respond. I think I know where this is going.
Mr. Kaiser pipes up from his perch on the spare seat in the sparse room. “I can’t have a stage manager that isn’t around, Crystal.” His voice is harsh. I glance at the two students—both of whom are younger than me—and then back at the man.
“I can still be stage manager. I just had other stuff to attend to.”
“Well, it’s not good enough. You have to be there. Whatever that stuff might be,” Mrs. Estrada barks. “Or we’ll have to replace you.”
My eyes narrow as my temper flares up. “Well, excuse me if I’ve only been homeless for three weeks in the last month. Sorry for the inconvenience that places on you. However, you knew well before this, Mrs. Estrada, that I would not be at rehearsals. It was your job to tell Mr. Kaiser that I would not be able to be here for several rehearsals. You failed.” I look back at the students in the room and feel extreme disgruntlement. I hadn’t wanted any of my peers to know. Now, everyone in the play would know. “Now, if you excuse me, I have a play I have to get back to. Thank you for your concern.” I turn and walk out, not looking back. Fifteen minutes later when the show hit intermission in rehearsal, Mr. Kaiser pulls me aside.
“Crystal, I’m sorry about that in there. I didn’t know your situation. What happened?” he asks.
“We paid our landlord, our landlord didn’t pay the mortgage. The court told us we had to get out because we couldn’t prove we weren’t related to him. It’s no big deal really. I wish that the student directors hadn’t been in there, though,” I reply meekly.
“I would never have guessed you had no home. I thought you were just ditching practice,” Mr. Kaiser says. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”
“It’s not your fault. You would have never known without me telling you expressly. I didn’t want anyone to know. Just goes to show that books sometimes have deceptive covers.”
*please note the title has no real tie with anyone taking me home LOL*
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