Losing Romeo Read Online Free

swear to God, this place is just trying to bore me to death. It takes everything I have to not put toothpicks in my eyelids to prop them open just to stay awake.
    Maybe things would have been different if Oak Hill kidshadn’t been rezoned to come out to this suburban nightmare and instead we went to Riverwood High like Anje, Kierra and I had been planning since we were in grade school. I can’t stand being around these black bourgie sellouts.
    I should drop out.
    I want to drop out.
    Hell. It’s not like my father would ever know. He doesn’t know half of what I do. If he did, it would probably give him a heart attack. I can’t help chuckling at that. Then I draw in a deep breath and exhale slowly. There’s a part of me that knows that I shouldn’t be so hard on my dad. After all, he did come to my rescue that night at Shadiq’s party and pick me up from that lone dark road. That was cool. But after that, he went right back to being an MIA dad and I went back to feeling like a ghost in our apartment. We hardly speak, talk or even remain in the same room together when he’s home.
    Yeah, I know that jobs are tight and he has to hold on to whatever piece of job that he has at all costs, but most of the time I just feel like…the world has forgotten about me. My damn mother definitely did. She just packed up and left like we suddenly didn’t matter anymore. I know that was hard on my dad, too. For a long time after she left, there wasn’t a liquor bottle he didn’t like. That’s when I started to feel like he’d walked out on me, as well.
    It still feels that way. To this day, he’s never really sat down and tried to explain to me what happened. Sure, they fought all the time. She’d scream. He’d yell. Things were thrown, and in the end a door was slammed with the words, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    I didn’t get it.
    I still don’t.
    For a long time I was in denial, thinking that she just left to teach him a lesson and that she was going to come back. He was going to apologize, and we could go back to being the dysfunctional family that we’d always been. When that didn’t happen, I thought that I was really the cause of her leaving and no one had the guts to tell me. Eventually, she mailed my father a letter, but he never let me read it. I want to know what it said, but now I lack the guts to ask my dad to see it.
    After the sadness and then the depression, I started to feel resentment and then anger. I seem to be stuck on angry.
    My dad’s drinking eventually subsided. He slips up every now and then. But I do recognize that he’s trying to reconnect. But honestly? I still feel like it’s a little too late.
    â€œAyo, Tyler! Wait up!” a voice yells out to me. “Where you goin’?”
    I jerk around to see Michelle and Trisha plodding their way toward me. Looks like I’m not the only one that decided to skip class. “Nowhere,” I holler back and then shrug my shoulders when they catch up with me. “I was just kickin’ it.”
    Michelle and Trisha are also Oak Hill girls, aka hood rats, according to our bourgie classmates. I guess you can say we’re sort of friends, even though I broke their onetime leader, Billie Grant’s, nose on the first day of school. At first I thought that made me enemy number one, but it turned out that Billie wasn’t all that well liked within her own clique. That or there’s just no loyalty nowadays.
    Anyway, I started hanging with Michelle and Trisha during the time Anje and I were beefing. I guess they are all right. They introduced me to a few things—nothing too serious—experimenting with marijuana and stuff. But I don’t trust them any farther than I can throw them.
    â€œWhat are y’all doing out here?”
    â€œWe saw you sneaking off the school grounds, so we figured we’d just catch up and hang with