The Road Nobody Wanted to Walk

At 5:10 every morning, before most of the houses in Mill Creek were awake, fourteen-year-old Amara Johnson opened her eyes.

The room was still dark.

There was no alarm clock.

She didn’t need one.

For three years, her body had learned the schedule by heart.

She quietly climbed out of the old bed she shared with her younger sister, pulled on her school uniform, and reached beneath the bed for her shoes.

One of them had a crack across the sole.

She had repaired it twice with glue.

It was beginning to open again.

Amara pressed the sole against the floor.

It held.

“Good enough,” she whispered.

From the kitchen came the sound of coughing.

Her mother was already awake.

“Amara?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

“Eat something before you go.”

Amara looked toward the kitchen.

There wasn’t much.

A piece of toast sat on a plate.

Her little sister, Nia, was still sleeping.

Amara picked up the toast, broke it in half, and placed one piece beside Nia’s pillow.

Her mother watched from the doorway.

“You need it more than she does.”

Amara smiled.

“She’ll need it when she wakes up.”

Her mother didn’t argue.

She simply looked away.

There were some kinds of poverty that made people count every piece of bread.

And there were other kinds that made a mother proud and heartbroken at the same time.

Amara put the remaining piece of toast in her mouth, grabbed her backpack, and stepped outside.

The morning air was cold.

The road ahead was dark.

Her school was eight miles away.

There was a bus.

But the bus cost money.

And every morning, Amara made the same choice.

Bus fare…

or food.

She always chose food.

Then she started walking.

The first mile wasn’t difficult.

The second wasn’t terrible.

By the fourth, her feet began to hurt.

By the sixth, she was tired.

By the eighth, she was usually running late.

But she kept going.

Because Amara had made herself a promise.

She wasn’t going to let the circumstances of her childhood decide the size of her future.

Her father had once told her something she never forgot.

“Being born poor isn’t your fault, baby.”

He had paused.

“But giving up on yourself is a decision you should never make.”

Her father had died two years earlier.

Since then, those words had become her fuel.

And every morning, as she walked those eight miles, she repeated them.

Keep going.

Even when her feet hurt.

Keep going.

Even when she was hungry.

Keep going.

Even when nobody believed she could become anything different.

She didn’t know it yet, but one morning soon, that road was going to test her harder than ever before.

And this time…

walking away would have been much easier than continuing.