Clarissa Quigley

Dr. Haslam

English 2010

1 February 2022

My Memoir

My story is about my old next door neighbor, her name is Lilliana. I met her when I was

about twelve and she was probably fourteen. We became pretty fast friends, but eventually

stopped because I realized that she was a bad influence on me. She was living with her adoptive

grandma, who was very old and weak. She didn’t do anything except sit in front of a tiny black

and white tv watching telenovelas, and she barely spoke any english.

Throughout the years that they lived next to us, there were always boys going in and out

of the house by climbing the fence and going through the basement window. We had reason to

believe that they were drug dealers, and they often had the police called on them. Whether it was

for a noise complaint, a warning about how out-of-control their lawn was getting, or fights that

they boys would get in.

One day, we had a man and woman come to our house.

“Have you seen our foster son? We know he keeps coming to the house next door.”

This was a few days after he was arrested, so we hadn’t seen him come back yet. But we

got their contact information, just in case he did come back, which he eventually did. After that,

we just assumed that all of the boys were foster kids constantly running away from their foster

parents.

Two years later, Lilliana and the boys turned eighteen, and they were no longer in

custody of their foster parents. Lilliana eventually got pregnant, and had a baby boy. The front
window of the house was always stacked high with boxes and papers, you couldn’t see into the

house. Which they may have done on purpose. The windows on the house were always covered

up, the shudders were torn off, and their house had gotten egged a couple of times, so the house

looked awful all of the time. Which made me feel bad for the baby, that he had to grow up in

those living conditions. I assume that if the outside of the house, and what I can see of the inside,

looked so awful, then the whole house must look like that. I asked my parents if Child Protective

Services were ever called on them, and they said probably not, otherwise they would have taken

away the baby. In an article I found called “What CPS Can and Cannot Do (& What To Do

About It)”, they said that CPS can investigate reports, even if they are false. So they would’ve

been able to observe what was going on in that house, and decide what was best for the baby. But

the parents are also allowed to refuse questioning and if CPS could enter their home or not.

While things started to calm down once the baby was born, Lilliana and her boyfriend

were still too young to take care of a child. If CPS had been called, I am almost certain that they

would have taken that poor baby away from them.

My goals and choices

When deciding to write about this story, it was hard for me to piece together a story that

would be interesting enough and not be so sporadic. So what I did was write down all the

memories I have from my memories of my old neighbors and then pulled all of the stuff that had

to do with my topic so it all made sense. Then I was able to connect them all together so that they
sounded related and flowed the way I needed them to. At some point, my story hadn’t reached

the word count and I had to rewrite the story on a new document, trying to phrase it differently to

see if I could add something that I didn’t have in the original draft. I was able to add a few

sentences and words and reached the word count. The next step was to revise and reread my

story. I read it out loud and could see if there was anything that I needed to change or add to help

it make sense. Fixing grammatical errors, run on sentences, or anything related to that.
 Work Cited

Thelin, N. (2022, February 1). What CPS can and cannot do (& what to do about it). Low

Income Relief. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from

https://lowincomerelief.com/what-cps-can-and-cannot-do/#:~:text=Advertisements-,CPS%

20can%20investigate%20reports%2C%20even%20if%20they%20are%20false.,can%20ma

ke%20reports%20as%20well.