Jack's P.O.V
One Week Later
I never liked to stay in one place for too long. I got scared in case someone came along and took Scarlett away or something.
I cried that night. A lot. I just didn’t care anymore. It felt like everyone who had ever loved me had let me down in life. Everyone who I had ever loved was gone. My mom just left. If she loved me so much, then why the hell did she go?
I hated her for doing that.
My older sister never showed much love towards me and Scarlett. She always put the twins first.
And my dad? He was just a waste of space.
Where did it all go wrong? I guess it always had been wrong, in a way. My mom married my dad when she was eighteen and he was nineteen. She had my older sister, Madison, seven months later. I can’t imagine why they got married...
Then I was born a few years later, and then my brothers Max and Kyle a couple of years after that. Then Scarlett—she was the apple of my eye, my little sister. She was more like my own kid to me than a sister, I guess because she was so young. My mom and dad just got married because she was pregnant. If she hadn’t been, maybe they wouldn’t have stayed together at all.
My dad had always had an alcohol problem. They just tried to hide it when we were younger, because it wasn’t so bad at that stage, anyway. We were just a normal family living in Queens in a normal four bedroom house. We had a big garden. I loved that garden, with its beautiful green trees to climb and hours of exploring to be done. My dad even built a tree house for us! I had lots of friends, and was very cheeky at school—not rude, just cheeky.
I was a good kid.
Then, when I was seven, my dad’s brother—my Uncle Tony—died. He was a wreck—a massive, alcoholic wreck. He lost his job as a building contractor because he was too drunk to work. He drank away our savings, spent every last penny on booze. My mom had to leave her job working as a hairdresser because she had to take care of us and could only work part time. She had to take up a part time job as a waitress. She spent all her money on food and there was none left over for clothes, shoes, the bills, the mortgage, gas, birthday and Christmas presents and everything else we wanted or needed. All because my dad drank it away. We had to leave our beautiful house in Queens and move to a housing project in Harlem instead. Two bedrooms and nineteen stories high. No magic garden, but there was a basketball court where I used to practice my hoops late at night.
I guess I grew up fast in a way. You have to when you’re just trying to survive. Some days I would go without food because my mom just couldn`t afford it. One time, I fainted at school because I was so hungry. I couldn’t cope with school anymore. I was angry at the system, angry it had condemned me and my family to a life of poverty.
I didn’t want to end up in foster care. I’d rather live on the streets than be placed in foster care and split up and lost and confused.
I hated the system. I didn’t want to go into foster care. No way. I could look after myself.
Me and Scarlett against the world.