Emma: Homelessness in the U.S.A.

Families were too different, perhaps too happy, she had decided. Families … they just weren’t what Emma wanted. Well, it wasn’t like she could get much she wanted; she didn’t have a house to live in, a warm bed to sleep in, healthy food to eat or clean water to drink. She didn’t even have a mother or father to love or be loved by. But she wouldn’t want to have a family of her own – for fear of what she had to endure would happen to her own children.
The tympanic rhythm of Emma’s ragged, dirty boots beat against the hard ground, like soldiers marching, the cadence echoing through her mind. She had nowhere else to go, nothing to do but walk. Emma didn’t even know how old she was – somewhere around 15 or 16, she presumed. Years of no love, no comfort, no house, had taken their toll on her – her face was nearly always dirty, she had next to no clothes, there was nobody she could call her friend.. all Emma had was a small backpack she wore, carrying an extra pair of shoes and another set of her current clothes – torn denim jeans and a faded, ripped, dusty black shirt. Emma never even knew her parents – they both died in an armed robbery while she was only weeks old. All she had to remember them by was the fact that they had no house, and so they were forced to live in the homeless shelter, and so when her parents were killed, the community (the homeless people of the city, that is) was left with a newborn baby to raise.
Whilst this doesn’t seem like a problem at first, not everybody was kind and warm-hearted like the leader, Joel. There were men who... did things to Emma. Unspeakable things. Things that made her feel sick, made her hate human beings and how disgusting they really can be, made her want to leave the camp altogether, and so when she was a teenager she ran away. Where to? Anywhere she could find. Emma took things in a pattern; take the first right, then the first left, take the first right, then the first left … Maybe she would find somewhere to stay –