Lost Girl on a Journey
BY BLAIR SCHOTT
W
hat if you were all alone in this big difficult
world? I was. My name is Zoey Martin.
My story dates all the way back to 1999. I
was abandoned as a baby at a gas station on Route 89.
The social worker told me that I was found in a 1985
Ford truck with no license plates. I had only a diaper
on that was two weeks overdue. Imagine that diaper
rash? YIKES! Anyways, that was the start of my
down hill life. Around the age of 5, I was taken in by
a family that over 5 kids from the system already.
From what I remember, the parents were okay, but I
know for a fact that the kids weren’t. They would do
very harmful things to me. I still have marks and
burns on my back from where they would try to
“cook” me. I have always been a tiny frame person so
that made it a harder struggle to fight back.
I was taken from that family after almost a
year of living there. I went in and out of homes like
people refill their cars for gas. I never had anything
that was special to me. I didn’t know my mom so
there was no way of having a necklace that my grandma passed down to her and she passed down to me. I
guess you could say that I lived out of a book bag. I
mean it is better than a plastic bag.
One day, I got the courage up to runaway
from the system and live my life the way I wanted to
live it. I wouldn’t have people pushing and pulling
me certain ways. I would make my own decisions. I
was 14 ½ when I packed up my book bag and fixed
my bed as if I was still sleeping in it. Let me tell you
this, stealth is not as easy as you would think. When
I finally made it out of the house, I ran as fast as I
could. By the time I stopped, I was probably 1 ½
miles away from the foster home.
I ended up in a park five cities over from
where I was staying. I would walk around the playground and watch people play soccer to past the time
during the day. At night, I would go under the shelters they had put up for birthday parties and sleep under the picnic tables. Yes, the ground was not the
best, but some how I would live on that ground for
the rest of my life if it met not going back to the fos-
ter home.
About a week after my runaway, I was watching a ton of older guys play soccer. Some were really
cute. To them, I was probably just a nerdy redhead
with bright blue glasses that you could probably smell
a mile away. I was sitting at the top of the bleachers.
One of the players ran over to where I was sitting and
grabbed something to drink. He looked up at me and
I hurried up and look