Excerpt From My NaNo Novel

Tonight I’m working hard on my NaNo novel so in lieu of my regular post I’ll include an excerpt from what I’m working on. With the working title of Runaway, it’s based on the true story of my life as… a runaway ;p

I’m 7,000 plus words into it and I have a long way to go.  Here’s a bit of what I wrote this morning:

From Runaway: When all had settled down and the tampons were supposedly found and all the alarms were reset we had a whispered conference back in our room.  I expected to be cast out of the circle of friendship when I had come back empty handed, but that was not the case.
The girls wanted to hear every detail of my failed shoplifting attempt until we were finally too tired to discuss things anymore and the whispers subsided.

I learned a valuable truth that night; it’s those that are in duress that make the most loyal
friends.  Adversity acts like a magnet, drawing us together.  All the barriers of race, education and wealth vanish in the face of a common enemy.  In our case, the common enemy was the adult world that had dictated to us without understanding, with the housemom as their representative.  Nothing bonds like battle.

I learned another valuable truth the next morning; there’s usually a self-interested traitor in the mix somewhere.  While we were still gloating about our success upstairs, someone had already gone and reported the entire adventure.  Before breakfast a house meeting was called and I was informed that I needed to leave because I was a bad influence on the other girls.  I remember being surprised by that.  I was a sheltered bookworm up until a few months ago.  Now I was being ostracized for being too bad to associate with juvenile delinquents.  I didn’t feel different, just cornered.

The third thing I learned from that brief stay is that most of the time a “bad attitude” is really just a perceived lack of choice.  No one was very interested in actually communicating to me, just dictating laws.  As an American child I knew what democracy
was, and that it was my right.  What I didn’t understand was why I was being denied what I considered my birth right.