"How's it going?"
"It's been pretty gray, rainy in the Delaware Valley lately.." I look into the clear, blue sky. She knows exactly what I mean.
Plus, my bruised arm and cut cheek are a pretty good indication.
"Just think, pretty soon, you're going to be out on your own," she says reassuringly.
"I don't know if that's any better." We laugh. My sense of humor is what started our bond. And a strng friendship ensued. If it wasn't for her, I would have been out of here by now. I would have made a run for the hills.
I've thought about it several times. As long as I had my worker's permit, I could go anywhere. But I never had the courage. And she was just another reason to stay. But even she was leaving.
And I'd be all alone. Besides the hopefully frequent phone calls.
Everyone stopped asking me what college I'm going to. I told them I wanted to focus on my job, working in the warehouse for several different grocery stores around here. The truth was obvious- I'm a foster kid in a barely-middle class family, with a drunk of a father. There was no money to send me to college. Claire says I'm smart enough to get a scholarship, but my transcript says differently. I know more than most of the upper-class honor students, but lack the drive, and my main problem is that I know this, but I don't care enough to fix it. But I've accepted my fate. It's the rest of the world that won't seem to.
My dream, is to one day sustain myself with my own computer. I used to entertain myself through classes by writing programs for my graphic calculator. Stupid stuff. Just to keep myself occupied. Just because I could.
Can you imagine getting yelled at for having your calculator out in class? I was that guy.
Now I mess around with PHP. I took a class on Visual Basic, but it was the same as my calculator. I want to create web sites. For myself. For other people. For money. For the fun of it. But over the years, I've learned not to count on dreams to come true.