My name is boots. When I was only five, both of my parents died of disease. I was immediately put in an orphanage. Life in an orphanage is not an easy thing. You are starved and beaten by the adults in charge. The first chance I got, I ran away. Before I knew it, they had caught me. I was sent back to the orphanage and treated even worse than before. After a week I was ready to attempt an escape again. This time I brought another orphan with me and we were gone for two whole days before we were found. We were about to go to sleep one night in an alley when five police officers found us. They beat us up and brought us back to the orphanage. They knew that I would try to escape a third time, so they watched me very carefully from that point on. I wasn’t going to live my life in an orphanage so I started planning my next escape. I knew I had to take my time and be careful this time. Three other boys wanted to leave with me. We didn’t leave for three whole months until one night, we knew it was time. We waited until nobody was watching us and we crawled through the window. It wouldn’t be very long until they noticed we were gone, so we ran as fast as we could. We found a dark alley that looked like a good place to hide. We stayed there for weeks without being noticed. It was so much better than the orphanage but there was only one problem. We had no food. We only ate what we found in people’s trash or what people gave to us when they saw we were starving. All this changed when we ran into a group of other orphans. They had run away from other orphanages in the area. They provided us with food, shelter, and clothing. We lived in a big, abandoned building. We were like a big family and all we had was each other. From this point on,I finally enjoyed life.