CHAPTER 3

I was 5 years old and could barely speak English. I learned some words from watching TV at home and from having conversations with people in my neighborhood. My mother enrolled me in the local elementary school about two miles away from our apartment. I absolutely loved going to school. It didn’t take me long to learn English, and I was very strong in math. I remember being proud when my teacher praised me for picking it up so fast. The positive feedback felt incredibly good, considering how little of it I was used togetting.

I would walk to school and back, alone more days than not. My mother had asked our neighbor to take me in the morning, and also to pick me up and watch over me until she made it home from work. This lady was like two different people. Around my mother she was friendly and nice, but as soon as mom left, she instantly changed and became mean and nasty. I never told my mom. I don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to protect her, and not make her life any harder than it already was. I knew if I told her, she’d be forced to confront the problem, and she’d lose a babysitter she desperately needed. The woman rarely walked me to and from school, but lied to my mom and let her think she did.

One day I was waiting on the playground for the babysitter to come and get me. As usual she didn’t, so I left on my own and began to walk to her house. I was about to cross the street when I noticed the light had turned yellow. I thought I needed to hurry up and cross before it turned red. I started to run as fast as I could to beat the light, when a kid from school stuck his foot out to trip me. I flew face first onto the street and slammed into the pavement. As I lay in the street, I could feel that my hands and arms were scraped and bleeding. No one bothered to come and help me and the cars waiting at the light were honking their horns at me as I tried to pick myself up. My nose was leaking like a faucet and blood began to run down my shirt and pants. I walked the two miles to the neighbor’s house. Somewhere along the way, I took my shirt off and pinched my nose with it, trying to stop the bleeding as I trudged home.

When I finally knocked on the babysitter’s door, she began to yell at me, and it was clear she was more worried about me getting blood in her apartment than she was about me bleeding in the first place. She didn’t let me inside, so I sat on her porch while she continued screaming at me. She finally asked me what happened. I told her the story while my head and nose were throbbing and I tried not to think of how much pain I was in. She didn’t even bother to help clean me up. When my mother arrived a few hours later, she freaked out when she saw me. I am more than positive my nose was broken. We went home, I showered up, and put ice on my face. The thing I remember most is the burning anger I felt deep down. I felt as if I was completely alone in the world and that no one gave a shit about me. I thought about my father and what he would have done if he was around. And I was all the more angry, because he wasn’t.

It wasn’t just tough for me at home with my father gone. I noticed my mother was extremely sad and I often caught her crying. I don’t know if she was missing my father, or