But I wonder if my friends’ summer was as bad as mine. My summer was the worst in my short fourteen years of life. It all started with a phone call that I will never forget.
My mom was crying, begging, and pleading; asking for more time as if she were gasping for a last breath of air. Though I never paid attention to “adult matters,” this time I was all ears. I never wanted to see my mom cry.
As she hung up the phone, she turned around to see me standing there, confused and scared. I didn’t know what was wrong. She quickly held me as tight as she could, and said that she was sorry. She began to cry again, this time, harder. Her tears hit my shirt like bullets. She told me that we were going to be evicted and she kept apologizing to me, saying she failed me as a mother and provider. She was a month behind on the rent. The landlord was already money-hungry, so it made the situation worse. I was too young to get a job. The only job I could get in my neighborhood was selling drugs—so I decided to pass.
While kids were having fun enjoying the summer, I was packing my clothes and belongings into boxes and wondering where we were going to end up. My mom didn’t know what to do or where to go. We had no family to lean on. No money was coming in. Without a job, my mom didn’t have enough money to get another place. What to do? No father to help out either, just a single mom and her son.
The night before the sheriff was supposed to pay us an unwelcome visit, I prayed to God for a way out of this madness. Sad and depressed, I attempted to get some sleep that night in the hope that something good would happen.
The morning of our eviction, a hard knock on the door awoke me. The sheriff was here to do his job. We were moving all our stuff out as fast as we could. I started to look up to the sky, waiting for something to happen. I looked at my mom to see if she was all right because she was silent as she moved the stuff out.
