My name is Sydney. I am 11 years old and last summer my mom went to Europe for a month and left me with a single crumpled 20 in my hand. See, you are independent now, she said with a bright smile, hauling her suitcase toward the door. You are not a baby anymore. Just order food if you need to. Okay. Independent. That was her word, not mine. I stared at the bill in my palm. $20. Not a plan, not a babysitter, not even a real goodbye. Just a fake kiss on my forehead, the sound of a suitcase rolling down the driveway, and the front door closing in my face.
“I will be fine,”
I said out loud to an empty hallway, as if saying it could make it true. But my hands were shaking. There was no one else in the house, no one who could cook, no one who even knew I had been left here alone. I tried to pretend this was some kind of challenge I could win. Day one, I told myself, I will prove that I can handle this. I lined up the few cans in the pantry, checked the fridge that was already half empty, and shoved my fear down as far as it would go. If my mom thought I was independent, then maybe she should see what that really looked like. Because as that month ticked forward, the $20 in my hand would disappear, the food would run out, and the silence in our house would turn into something darker than loneliness. And when they finally came back, what my mom saw inside our home made her whisper,
“No, no, this cannot be happening.”
Do you want to know how being left with $20 at 11 turned into the one decision that made my mom regret everything she had done to me? Stay to the end and you will see exactly how I made sure she would never forget it. The first problem hit me about 10 minutes after the taxi pulled away. My mom had tossed a shiny emergency credit card on the counter like that would fix everything. There was just one catch. It was not activated and I did not know the PIN. I found that out the hard way. Standing at the doorway with my phone in my hand, trying to order food and watching every app reject the card over and over. So, it was just me, a dead card, and $20.
Day one, I made it a game. I sliced bread as thin as I could, spread peanut butter so carefully it barely covered the surface, and told myself real survivors made things stretch. I even joked in my head that this would make a good story someday. By day three, it stopped being funny. The pantry looked like a before picture in a commercial about hunger. A couple of cans I did not know how to open without cutting myself. A box of cereal with more air than food and a jar of pickles I hated. My stomach growled loud enough to embarrass me even though no one else was there.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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