I was one of those kids that fell through the cracks. My mother used to say there was just no one there to catch me. Wasn't my fault I never amounted to anything. Wasn't her fault either, evidently. There was always someone else to lay the blame on.

Oh, I started out okay, I guess. Interested, eager, motivated even. But what little kid isn't motivated? Every morning is another chance to live when you're seven.  At seventeen, though, things aren't so rosy anymore.

My mother was a quietly raging alcoholic in a shiny suburban town. All through junior high and high school, I was the one chosen (of the six kids in the family) to stay home from school on any given day to see she didn't kill herself or set the house on fire. Or whatever I was supposed to do. The instructions were never quite clear, and the problem itself -- the word -- was never really uttered aloud. My father would just say something like "I think you should stay here today and be in charge" and we'd both know exactly what was actually being said.

I wasn't the oldest child. Far from it. But somehow, I was the one everyone counted on to keep things on an even keel. It might have looked to someone else like that was a compliment, but to me it felt more like being discounted. Why was it okay for me to miss all that school and then be left taking the heat from my teachers and the administrators? Why was it okay for me to be pegged as "unmotivated" and "lazy" and to carry that reputation right through to graduation? 

My older sisters, well, one was being primed for Harvard, and the other was pretty and being primed for God-knows-what. And my brothers, well they were boys, of course. Me? I felt expendable. They used the word "dependable." 

I still remember the day I finally broke down and told someone at school what was going on. I didn't mean to. It just sort of came out and then spilled all over the floor.

It was an English teacher I told. Mrs. Yacobian. I was supposed to be in her first period Great Books class, but, as far into the school year as February, I'd been there so infrequently she hardly knew my face. She stopped me in the hall one day and looked at me with the look I'd come to expect from teachers. 

"Aren't you supposed to be in my A period class?" she asked curtly. I looked at my shoes and murmured something in the affirmative, just trying to hurry it along so I could leave.

"Well why aren't you ever there?" she asked.

I don't, to this day, know why I chose that moment to utter the word for the first time out loud.

"It isn't that I don't want t come," I began, "but there are so many mornings when I need to stay home to watch my mother. She's an alcoholic. My father makes me stay home with her."

I still remember how saying the word made me feel. I was hot all of the sudden. My stomach turned and I felt the tears start to well up. It felt like both a relief and a sin at the same time.

But all she did was put a hand on my arm and guide me to the side of the hallway, against the lockers.

"I had no idea," she said. "I didn't know what was happening at home. Have you told anyone else about this? Have you talked to anyone about it?"

I shook my head, looking down, conscious now of the tears and mad as hell that I couldn't stop them.

"Well, you've told me, and I'm glad you did. This can stay between us."

And it did. For the next two years.