All Roads Lead to Starbucks

Chapter 1

A/N This story is completely fictional and is not going to be based off of the real owner of Starbucks' life, or that of his family.

"What can you tell me about your time spent at the Rogers' residence?"

The woman glared at me, obviously expecting an answer. Her crimson hair was pulled in a bun so tight and slicked back it looked like her eyes should be tugging at the corners. She was practically the epitome of a stereotypical social worker.

I never thought I'd end up in this situation, with a social worker asking me questions about my dull life, but I guess some things come unexpectedly. Kind of like how my mother's death came unexpectedly.

The woman, or I guess her name was Beth, according to her prominent name tag, snapped at me in a fashion that made it seem like her time was more important than this. Beth was not exactly the nicest person, I'd discovered after my solid 5 minutes in her office.

"Miss Carter," she said in a sharp voice.

I looked up from the family picture sitting on her desk to find that she had come closer to me, with an impatient expression on her face. She was still waiting for an answer to her question.

"I don't know," I replied quietly, "I was there for about 2 weeks, I guess. Maya cooked up this plan that I should hide there with her so I didn't have to find my deadbeat father. Her mom didn't know about it until the cops and you people showed up, so I imagine she's in a bit of trouble right now. I hid in her room and watched TV, she brought me food, and that was about all that happened."

Her fingers moved to the keyboard quickly to jot down what I had said, and then she started reciting another one of her questions.

"Were you at any time mistreated during your stay at Miss Rogers' house?"

I laughed at this one. Mistreated was the farthest away from what I would have called staying there. It was better than any time I'd ever spent at home alone, while my mother was working to keep a one bedroom apartment over our heads. Then she would come home exhausted and fall asleep.

"No. I got free food, a free place to sleep, a friend to accompany me every second of the day. It was better than my usual weekend,"

Beth looked uninterested as she continued to make notes over my answers to these extremely important questions of hers. She sighed heavily before asking me what I knew about Regina Carter, also known as my mother.

When I heard my mother's name I felt like I should feel something, like I should be sad about how she wasn't here or some other emotional crap like that. The problem was that I didn't feel anything. My mother had died and yet I felt nothing. I tried to feel sad about her death while I was staying at Maya's, but I didn't. I tried to cry about it, to wallow in her death like it was a swimming pool and I was sinking to the bottom. The thing was that it didn't feel that different now that she was gone. When she was alive I had always been alone, and now I was still alone. This time I just didn't have a crappy apartment to come back to.

My mother treated me like a burden. She never completely said it, but I knew it existed there under her skin, deep down. I knew how I came to be of this world, after all the pestering about where my dad went to and why my mom was so young, she had finally broken down into tears and spilled the story about how she had been a stupid high schooler once too. After that I had always felt like a weight on my mother's shoulders and had mostly avoided her.

She worked as a waitress about a mile away at a chain restaurant called Harrod's for extremely long shifts. Usually when she was done with work she would go out for a drink with her ever changing dates. That was another thing, men usually stopped dating her after they found out about me. They didn't like knowing that their girlfriend had given birth to me while she was barely out of high school, or that she dropped out of high school and worked at a chain restaurant for $10 an hour.