This Feeling is Not Love

Chapter 2

Andy once spent six weeks living on the streets the summer after 7th grade while on the run from police. Andy, personally, was not on the run, but his brother had been involved in a drive-by shooting, and therefore was a wanted man. When his brother fled their tiny one room apartment with all of his belongings stuffed in a backpack with one strap barely clinging to life, Andy had no choice, but to follow. He didn't know who his father was, doubted even his mother knew. Even if she did, she passed away a long time ago and took it to her grave without telling him. His older brother had been his legal guardian since he plucked him from foster care at 8-years-old.

Normally, a drive-by shooting drew little attention, and the police couldn't muster up two shits about another incident like that happening in his neighborhood. But this particular drive-by resulted in the death of an innocent 15-year-old girl. The local community roared, the media caught on, and with so much attention, pressure from the local government, and a city calling for blood for a neighborhood they generally showed no concern over, the police were extra determined to catch everyone involved.

At the time they took to the streets, Andy knew none of this. All his brother told him was they had to go, and so Andy followed. Though, the entire six weeks his borther claimed over and over again, "I was just the driver." Andy did not know what that meant until his brother's arrest.

On the streets, they ate out of dumpsters, because it was too risky to go to the local soup kitchen. Once, sometimes twice, a week they'd break into his brother's old high school, the one he never graduated from, to shower in the gym with soap stolen from a corner store. They slept on the ground under bridges, on park benches, behind bushes with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some stolen jackets.

His brother promised over, and over, he'd get them out of there, to somewhere nice where there were no gangs, no violence, just the two of them. Someplace they wouldn't have to sleep on the ground anymore, or forage through dumpsters. He'd take care of Andy, he promised.

On the 6th week, his brother left him in the park, went wherever it was he wandered off to during the day, and never came back.

Instead, two police, one man, one woman, showed up instead. When they told him why they arrested his brother, what his brother had done, Andy cried for the last time.

He cried.

                And cried.

                                     And cried.

Until a grandmother he never knew he had (apparently the mother of a father he never knew) picked him up from the station the next day.

To this day, to this very moment, Andy had yet to forgive his brother for his involvement in that girl's death, and every single other person gunned down in that drive-by. His brother may have only driven the car, but he was still guilty of their deaths.

During his time on the streets, though, Andy learned a lot, from his brother, from the other people both homeless and not, from society. The first lesson he learned was that people treated you with disgust when you were homeless, even if you were just a kid, and you could not expect them to help you.

The second was survival required adaptability, and sometimes adaptability meant doing some truly disgusting things to survive, and leaving some really important people behind. The third was that you could not trust anyone, even if that person was family. The only person that could ensure your survival was you.

And lastly, living on the street taught Andy how to disappear, how to blend in, go unnoticed, avoid people. How to be invisible. It worked to his advantage quite a few times in the past, especially in high school, and his skills never failed him.