I was homeless a few times before the final time.

The first time I was homeless was when I was ten years old because my brother made me sooo mad, to the point where I was homeless for one evening. Obviously you realize that it isn’t much of a story because obviously I was 10. Obviously! But at ten years old, 6 hours feels like 4 days.

Kind of like how when you’re 25 and a year feels like 5 months.

I think it’s around 20 when 1 year feels like 1 year.

And when you’re 30, who knows (yet).

But when you’re 1 I bet 6 hours feels like a month.

Jeran was playing Super Nintendo. We had a Nintendo 64 so I don’t know why. Or I know why now, but at the time I thought, Why? We have new games.

He was playing Megaman X2 and I thought the graphics were so great but I wanted a turn so I could play Final Fight 3. He was being a complete controller-hog so I took these weird magnets that were for the fish tank and I put one of them against the screen just to put it in the way so he couldn’t see Megaman. It messed up the tv quite bad, so much so that he couldn’t see Megaman or any of the pixels onscreen. Magnets are the worst thing for a TV. So he chased me out of the house with a baseball bat and I was screaming crying and laughing all the same.

My dad was making water so he wasn’t around to help and my mom was making medicine so she too was just somewhere else.

He didn’t follow me. I just kept on running. I ran past the park and past the town square where they have my favorite carnival of all time every year. Not to mention the only carnival I knew (for now…).

I went to McDonald’s cause I knew it was open because it was around 1PM. I sat at a table with no money no nothing. I was just at the table doing pretty much not a damn thing besides playing with some straws and cup lids that they were giving away for free at the front counter.

A lady approached me and asked, where were the parents, they must be worried sick, yawn. And I explained how they were making water and medicine and all this stuff. And my brother chased me out of the house like a crazed bastard. All cause I wanted to play games, too?

She sat by me while I explained. She was somewhere between ten and forty years my senior. She looked like a teacher, even had one of those denim vests that a lot of them wore, not like that a heavy metal lover would wear. More teacherly, with patterns of butterflies and flowers on the front. And her arms had this excessive skin that I deemed unnecessary, although I understand that it’s just the way the world works.

The lady’s name was Beverly and she didn’t have any kids herself but was a teacher which is crazy that I was right. You can always tell.

She warned me that if I sat in here doing nothing, they’d make me leave unless I bought something. I pulled my pockets out of my shorts to show that I had no money, no nothing! So she offered to buy me one thing.

She came back with a Strawberry Milkshake and I said thank you in the bashful way we say it. Because when we were real little our parents would always go “Say thank you! Eddy, say thank you, now say thank you.” And then we feel like we have to say it and it just feels embarrassing at that point. And you never would have put this altogether but there’s like four years in a row of home videos of your 2nd 3rd 4th 5th birthdays where they go “Say thank you Grandma! Say thank you!” And it makes sense why you once wished that you never had to say thank you. And you wished that people trusted you enough to know that you appreciated them and their gifts without having to say it. Strawberry Milkshake!!!

Bev handed me a Mad Libs book and asked me if I ever heard of it. I said yes but the reality is folks that I lied. I just always lie like this. Like most movies that I’ve seen, I’ve actually not. I never knew Mad Libs (UNTIL NOW!).

So she didn’t explain to me how it worked. So I was a little confused.

The undersides of the pages where there are a bunch of words in parenthesis, I skipped that stuff entirely. To me it made no sense. Pointless pages. Bev enjoyed some of the Strawberry Milkshake and told me to go ahead and fill the book out. So I pencil’ed in the blanks (also provided by Bev).

April brings May SHOWERS.

WRESTLING GAMES make me HAPPY.

I want to throw a PARTY for all my FRIENDS and FAMILY.

It seemed easy, real little-kiddish. I don’t know if this was supposed to be fun, but no.

I filled a few pages. She asked me if I liked the book. I said yeah. I guess I just love to lie. And she said to look at the cover, and that she was the writer of the book!

The name Beverly was on the cover. I was shocked and impressed. Oh god, I met an author, this is amazing, I never met an author before. I was happy about that. Then she asked me to read some of the sentences for her.

I read,

-I love the bowling alley. It’s so LOVING.

She asked what I meant by loving. I explained that when you love something, that makes it loving. And I love the bowling alley, so I put the word LOVING in there.

She asked me to read another one.

-What a LOVING time we had bowling on my birthday!

And she liked my answers. She said they were funny but in a different way not funny at all. But she said to always round up, and that it was more funny than not, so it was probably just funny. She called it irreverent. I said I’m ten and don’t know what that means.

She explained to me the rules of Mad Libs. How you are supposed to think of words in the parenthesis on the top page. Funny words. Then you fill in the blanks with those funny words. Then you laugh.

I asked what was funny about just putting in a word that doesn’t make sense in there?

She took the book from me all snatch-y-like, and filled in some of the words at the top, and crossed out some of the ones I filled in at the bottom, replacing them with her own. She said, OK, listen to this. And she read.

-We had to leave our STRAWBERRY MILKSHAKE at the front desk.

-I thought we looked like a bunch of DUMBBELLS.

-Our lanes were next to a group of people wearing WRESTLING GAMES with their names sewn on them.

I laughed, and I told her OK, that made me laugh.

Then my mom showed up!!!!!!!!