"I wanna go home," she said quietly, tears flowing like rivers from her eyes.

"What do you mean? You are home," her mother replied, bringing the teenage girl into her arms.

"No." The girl spoke softy, but the emotion behind it all was more than powerful, as it had been stored up for several years. "This isn't home... Home was that little two-story house in Iowa. Home was when all of us were one. When we were... a family. When we all laughed and played and sang together.
But now all we seem to do is yell at each other... and cry."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her shaking hand and reached across the bed for her pillow. Her fingers reached the hem of its case and she began pulling it off, her mother's eyes now watering as much as her own.

The pillow, the one she'd had since she was three, was covered from one end to the other in stains...

Tear stains.

"I... I cry myself to sleep most nights. Other nights... Well, I write." She got to her feet and pulled a large stack of falling apart notebooks from the bottom drawer of her dresser. "Mom..."

"Oh, how did I not know? Why didn't..." Her mother's emotions became too much to handle, and her tears ran harder, her sobs filling the air once more.