Erin stayed with her new friends, that night they went for another ride and began looking for a new house to mark. It was exciting to doing something bad, she never thought she would do anything like this, all her life she'd been told to be good and she'd tried to be good but it never worked out. She couldn't help thinking maybe bad would work out, maybe she wasn't meant to be good, her mom wasn't good, her mom was bad news all over, maybe she was too.

They picked another house to break into, and together they worked out their plan of attack, these kids didn't like leaving things to chance, they said that's how you got caught. They let her help come up with ideas, they didn't treat her like a little kid but like an equal. She spent almost two weeks with these kids. They broke into one more house together and they began teaching her the ways of street life. They taught her how to pickpocket someone, and began teaching her how to steal watches. As the days past she began to find out little bits of information about the kids she was with. They were like her in many ways, none of them had fathers, and their mothers all battled addiction to one substance or another. Two of them were brother and sister, twins, the third the boy who took charge was on his own. They'd all met in a group home many years back, and like Erin when they'd been in foster care something bad had happened. Something so bad that the thought of going back to foster care was terrifying. They liked the streets, even when it was hard they had control of their situation.

They told her summer was easy, it was when the nights started to get cold that things got hard. In winter they'd go home, there was too much danger of freezing to death when the temperatures started falling. Home wasn't too bad they said, but the streets were better. Erin agreed, she would never have gone home if it wasn't for Teddy; she went home because she wanted to see her brother. Her mom smiled at her when she walked in the door and pretended like nothing had happened. Neither of them apologised to the other, they just went back to being the 'happy' little family they always were. The two weeks with Teddy were nice but as soon as he was gone the cycle started again. Erin went back to her new friends, her mom started drinking. That summer Erin truly learnt how to take care of herself, she learnt how to cook, how to clean, how to steal, how to survive.

Life was hard but when school went back it only got harder, Teddy stopped visiting, her mom was drunk or high, usually both almost constantly and the money finally ran out. Her mom stopped paying the rent and they were evicted from the apartment. With no family to turn to they began the nomadic life of the homeless, they moved between shelters, churches, train stations, friends' couches, and the streets.

Erin ran away regularly, but she always came back, a little part of her knew her mom needed her. The kids she'd befriend over the summer were good; they helped her out when things got really bad. Told her where to go to get help, places which wouldn't throw her back in the system. Life was hard though and she began to struggle at school, she was taken out of extension classes and it took everything she could just to keep up with the rest of the class. She worked hard at school, it wasn't easy but she didn't want to fall behind; somehow she was still maintaining at school the illusion that everything at home was fine. As November set in and the nights got colder a friend finally convinced her mom to let Erin stay with her so she could go back to rehab, her mom checked in on Erin's tenth birthday but no one remembered it was her birthday.

It wasn't until that summer that her mom was finally clean and sober enough to find a job, this time the job was at a bar which worried Erin to no end, she didn't see how her mom could stay clean and sober if she was around the stuff all day but it was better than nothing and finally meant they could afford a place to live. Her mom rented them two rooms in a large house that lots of other people lived in. It was like a big share house and it was weird, she was the only kid there, and the adults living there seemed to change constantly. She didn't like the place, the adults around her seemed creepy, like her mom's old friends, there were drugs in the house and alcohol and there was something funny going on in the basement, she didn't know what but the one time she tried to go down there she got yelled at. Her mom insisted it was better than the streets, but the only thing Erin liked about the place was the massive tree in the backyard which she could climb and hide from everyone. When Teddy came to visit that's where they played but Teddy didn't come to visit much anymore, when he did come it was always random, sometimes he'd stay for a few days, other times he'd stay for a few weeks, and sometimes she'd go months without seeing him. Her mom didn't seem to care about that so much anymore, at first Erin thought that strange then she realised her mom had found a new normal, she wasn't clean or sober but she'd managed to find functional.

The share house became there home, in as much as you could call the place a home, some of the adults there looked out for her, others completely ignored her but no one ever told her to leave, even when her mom started disappearing for days on end. Sometimes she'd ask if they knew where her mom was, other times she'd just accept that she was gone and wait for her to come back. She became good at forging her mom's signature on permission slips and there were a couple of men in the house who always seemed willing to give her money for field trips. She didn't like asking them for it but she found more often than not if she left the permission slip where they could see it they'd leave the cash for her. She wouldn't call any of the men family but she did start to feel affection for some of them. Her dad had never been around so sometimes it was nice to have these blokes be nice to her but she didn't want to rely on them for anything.

By the time she was twelve her life had settled into a strange new normal. The little street gang she'd joined at nine had grown and expanded. In winter it would shut down but come summer, when there was no longer school to worry about it thrived. As soon as the weather got warm Erin would start to run away. There was an abandoned house she would go to and meet up with the other street kids. Within those walls they'd make their plans, with years of experience she was one of their leaders. She knew what to look for and where to go and that didn't just apply to stealing but surviving as well. She knew every place in the city where you could get a free meal and she could read the weather like a farmer. Her favourite place was when she was with the kids like her but as the night time temperature dropped she'd have to go home. She'd show up after days of being absent and no one would say anything, no one would ask where she'd been. There were times when she'd wonder if they'd notice if she never came back.