Tyger Tales

by Jess Mowry

Kids run away for many reasons; abusive parents, a bad environment, poverty, lack of love or respect at home. A few run away for adventure. Others hope to find a better life, but most discover that life on the street is cold, hungry and lonely. It's also a jungle of predators. The smarter - or luckier - kids usually find that no matter how bad things were at home, at least they had a bed to sleep in and a chance to really escape by going to school and preparing themselves to win life's battles. Most runaways are heard from again, days, weeks, even months later. But a few kids just disappear, and only their faces on milk cartons, or images on "missing" websites prove they once existed. Collin Thatcher, thirteen-years-old in Oakland, California, has a reason for running away: his self-righteous Aunt Bulah, a part-time social worker and full-time fool, wants to put him in a boot camp for being "lazy and obese," take him away from his "dreamer" father, who was wounded in the Army, given a