When I was sixteen I climbed out of my bedroom window and caught a ride to a friend’s house, where I’d been staying for most of the summer. This wasn’t a friend my age, but a friend in his late twenties, who was married with young children. I wasn’t the only teenager staying there. It was me, Sunflower, Ody, Serenity, John, and a bunch of other people whose names I’ve forgotten. My name was Wildflower. If you lived in Olympia back then, you probably saw me sitting on the sidewalk, asking for change.
By the time I was sixteen I had lived on the streets many times. My mom kicked me out for the first time when I was twelve. It became a pattern. We fought; I ran away. She married when I was thirteen, and I kept running away, until I finally left my home state of Washington and hitch-hiked to San Francisco. For the first leg of the journey a man accompanied me. He must’ve been in his mid-twenties. We slept in a car and on a beach, but one day a ride came along that he didn’t want to accept…
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