Chelsea, now a senior in college reflects on her senior year of high school and how very different it looked from all of her other classmates. After being terrorized by her father for years her mother finally decides that she can’t take it any longer and wants to leave. She gives Chelsea a choice to come with her and have nothing or stay, but for Chelsea the decision was easy. So, on the planned day they pack what they can in her mother’s car and walk away from the only life they have known for nearly two decades and walk into homelessness. Living out of their car created a very different reality but with her mom she still felt safe. It was in this moment that the good work of other people came to lite. Cleaning themselves up in the local hotel bathroom daily they encountered Melissa the front desk clerk who supported them daily and fed them breakfast and Chelsea’s teacher Mrs. Cartwright who knew something was different with her favorite students. She required Chelsea to write in her journal daily and promised to write her back. It was in these communications that Chelsea told her their situation and Mrs. Cartwright shared with her that there are other homeless students at the school, ensuring that she didn’t feel like she was alone. Through the story Chelsea gains her balance from her supportive mother and teacher and before her senior year is done something amazing happens to her and her mom as well as the other homeless students in the school that remind us all that in the midst of a terrible situation there are always good people who are willing to do for strangers what they would do for their family. A difficult story of teen homelessness that is actively happening in all of our schools across America. *Character gender does not matter and can be changed to fit any performer.
Home of Good People
I’ve had this journal since my senior year of high school and here I am in my senior year of college. I never thought I would be here, I honestly thought I would be dead on the street by now. It was my journalism class, my journalism teacher, and my mom that got me here. As I sat in the back of my journalism class listening to the idiots in the room answer the teacher’s simple question, “If you can have one thing right now what would it be?” From the star football player saying he would want a new pair of cleats to the social media mogul wanting new make up for her tutorials, to the kids that didn’t even bother to do the assignment and finally to me. I’m flipping through the pages of my journal debating on if I even want to share what I honestly wrote with this class or if I want to bullshit and just take my grade. It’s not that I hate school, it’s not even that I hate myself as much as I don’t understand why this is happening to me at this point in my life. Where I am right now there were 1 million things running through my head that I wanted. I wanted to be able to hug my mother and congratulate her on leaving my abusive father. I wanted to be able to tell her how proud I was of the strength that she had. But I couldn’t because she was too busy beating herself up for not being able to give me everything that leaving my father had left us without. My journalism teacher saw me completely dazed out and she called on me to go next, “Chelsea it’s your turn. Can’t wait to hear what you have to say.” She was genuine. She was the best teacher I ever had, I thought of her as my second mom and I don’t think she ever really knew that. I walked up to the front of the room I turned and looked at my classmates, I was so scared I looked at the words that I had written, and they started moving on the page. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and a whisper in my ear smiling she said, “It’s okay. But I know you, you can choose to tell them the truth or you can choose to lie and just get a grade.” I smiled back, took a deep breath and I read. “If I could have one world right now it would be a home for my mom and I.”