Sixteen and a half years ago, just a month or two before my sixth birthday, I showed up to Beard’s door with a lightweight backpack and a tall, ethereal social worker.

Well, her name wasn’t really Beard. Her real name was Mary Louise, but all the kids called her Beard because of her fat, scratchy chin. Beard was a squat, simple, middle-aged woman who always minded her own business and would always feed you well.

I shared a bunk bed with a noisy seven-year-old Indian girl, who was named Julie, and across the hallway, there was Bobby’s room. Bobby was Beard’s adopted ten-year-old son. Most of the time, I stayed pretty quiet and out of the way, until Julie started to try to strike up dialogue during my second week at Beard’s place. She was pretty angry, but we struck up a friendship. She taught me how to swear and I taught her how to play cards- like I did with Donna, only a couple weeks before then.

The next fall, I started first grade and Julie started second. It was the fall of 1973, then. Bobby, Julie, and I would spend the days after school listening to The Doors’ Morrison Hotel, on Beard’s old record player in Bobby’s bedroom. We’d play cards and try to convince Bobby to let us hang out with him and his friends, tall baseball-playing guys who smoked cigarettes.

When I was eight, Julie ran away for the first time. She was nine. The very next day, two burly, white, mustache’d cops brought her back. They told Beard she’d been shoplifting gum from a gas station in a neighbouring town.

That night, Julie told me the story. I remember it vividly.

“I stole Bobby’s friend’s bike and rode all the way to the other town. It was ages to get there, Macey, you wouldn’t believe it! And then, when I was tryna get some gum, these cops came in and asked me all about if I knew were my goddamn mum was. I told ‘em to go to hell! But they took me back here, of course.”

The very next day, after the cops brought her back to Beard’s, she told me she was going to run away again and asked if I wanted to come. I didn’t really know what we were running away from- to me, Beard was a fantastic substitute to my drunken, screaming family. I said yes, anyway, and after school the next day, we began walking south. Julie said if we walked far enough south, we’d get out of Washington, and if we walked farther south, we’d get into California.

We never made it there, of course.