Read It Was Me All Along: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

didn’t understand fully why we’d leave our home to live in a town fifty miles away. Anthony had just begun high school and pleaded for us to stay. My best friend, Lilly, told me to run away instead. But when I overheard Mom on the phone with her sister Maureen, I heard words like “foreclosure” and sounds of crying as she talked about not having enough money.
    All eight of Mom’s brothers and sisters drove up from Boston to Methuen that summer to help us move everything we owned to Nana and Papa’s house in Medfield. I cried alone in my room. I found Mom crying, too, in our basement, just after everyone had left and we were readying ourselves for a final exit. I saw the way she bent over as she cried in the dark corner of the laundry room, trying to hide from Anthony and me so that we wouldn’t know how much it killed her to leave. How badly she wanted to save our home for us, and how heavily failure weighed on her shoulders, and her heart, when she realized she couldn’t. I watched her cry for ten minutes without letting her know I was there.
    When school started that fall, I wanted nothing to do with it. I feared being not only the new kid but the fat one, too. The bell had already rung as I walked into Mrs. Harrington’s fourth-grade classroom and made my way to the lone empty desk. I felt my cheeksflush as heads turned. I smiled at every person I passed with my mouth closed, since in first grade, kids had told me that the gap in my teeth and the chubbiness of my cheeks made me look like a chipmunk when I smiled wide. Half of me wished I hadn’t come in late that first day so that I could have avoided such a pronounced entrance, while the other half wished I hadn’t come at all. Seeing the way the other nine-year-olds looked at me made my pants feel tighter, made the waistband dig deeper into my belly. Everyone had moved on to wearing jeans, and I was still in stretch pants. Stirrups, no less. I wore gold earrings when other girls had those cool stick-on holograms of stars and moons. I was out of place.
    But a few months into the school year, I’d hit a kind of stride in Medfield. I learned that if I made fun of myself for being fat, then the other kids couldn’t do it first. I learned that being funny, especially with the boys, made it much less likely they’d call me things like “wide load” and “lardbutt.” I learned that certain jerseys in gym class were bigger than others and that I should always get to the pile of them first if I wanted mine to fit. I learned that even though the belts we wore while playing capture the flag never wrapped fully around my waist, they’d stay put if I tucked each end into my shorts. I learned that sometimes even your friends call you “whale” behind your back, but it doesn’t mean they don’t like you. I learned that it was easier to tell people that Dad was away on business rather than at home, drunk, and in his underwear. I learned that if I got invited to friends’ houses after school, I’d probably be asked to stay for dinner, and that would mean not eating alone at home while Mom worked.
    Just as soon as I began to adjust to our new life, I woke up to find Dad hadn’t come home the previous night. Mom told me thathe’d entered rehab. I sat at the kitchen table that morning, confused at the suddenness of his leaving. I came to learn, three days later from listening in on all Mom’s phone calls, that the night he didn’t come home, Dad had driven up the interstate while swigging from a gallon-size jug of vodka and had crashed into the guardrail on the right side of the road. He was en route to our old home in Methuen, where he had intended to park his car in the garage, close the door, and drink with the engine running until carbon monoxide filled the air enough to kill him. He hoped he wouldn’t come back from that drive home. The day I pieced all of this together, I stayed home from school and ate five bowls of cereal in a row. I kept my eyes