I was a teenage runaway. There. I said it. The strange thing is, all these years later, I can’t really tell you why. I started running away when I was around twelve years old. I would leave home and hide out at my friends’ houses. And when I look back now, I can’t point to some terrible thing my parents were doing to me and say, That’s why. I really don’t know. I know I was constantly getting grounded. I know I hated being told I couldn’t go anywhere. And I definitely remember my dad catching me smoking cigarettes when I was young. His solution was to shove a pack of cigarettes in my mouth. That didn’t work. I also remember him telling me I was grounded until I was eighteen. When you’re twelve years old, eighteen might as well be eighty. So I ran. I’d go to a friend’s house. I’d hide out. Eventually I’d come back. Then I’d run again. Looking back at that girl now, I sometimes wish I could sit down beside her and ask her what she was running from. Because I honestly don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t running from something as much as I was running toward something. I wanted a life. I wanted movement. I wanted excitement. And I definitely didn’t want to sit in a classroom. Running away and ditching school pretty much went hand in hand for me. By junior high, I was ditching school constantly. And I had apparently developed quite a system for it. Fake notes. Lots and lots of fake notes. You have to remember, this was long before parents got instant text messages and emails telling them their child had missed third period. Back then, if you were absent, you brought a handwritten note from your parent explaining why. Or, in my case, you brought a note that looked like it came from your parent. I must have thought I was getting away with it. Until ninth grade. One day, they called me into the school office. My dad was already there. That was not a good sign. Then someone brought out a box. Inside that box were all those fake absence notes I had been turning in. They poured them out onto the desk.