Fiction or truth?

I learned how to ride a bike so I could run away from home.

When I was small, my mother was always working and I didn't have a dad, so I was on my own a lot. And being small, I also had a lot of angst. Every day, it was just cartoons and angst. One day, I borrowed a rickety old bike from my friend Olivia who lived down the street. It was a terrible trip to the ER waiting to happen, that bike. Red and paint chipping and rusted. But it was a bike, and I was determined to run away on it so I got on it and started to ride.

I couldn't tell you how many times I wiped out, but after a whole day of trying I suddenly got the hang of it. It was like magic. One minute I was falling all over the place, and the next minute I found my center of balance and was riding like the wind.

I told Olivia I was going to run away then, and I rode off on that bike. She chased after me, and the two of us got as far as our subdivision's entrance.

"I'm going to run away," I told her again. She just stared.

"Well, give me the bike back. You can't take it with you," she replied finally, and for some reason that made me stop. She was my only friend, and all she cared about was taking her bike back. It was extremely disheartening, but I decided I wasn't going to run away after all. What was the point, if no one was even going to miss me?

"Let's go home," I sighed.

And after that, I mostly just watched cartoons.

Truth or fiction?

When I was little, around six or seven, my older cousins liked to terrorize me. Kevin and Henry were ten years older than me, and because I thought the world of them to the point of hero-worship, I tended to believe anything and everything they told me.

One day, my mother bought me a set of three adorable neon fish. Being still in my single digits, I wound up naming them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. I loved them, since they were the first living things entrusted in my care, and I doted on them diligently, following my mother's care instructions to the letter. I fed them twice a day, and always reminded my mother when it was time to give their bowl a good scrubbing.

My cousins, being teenage boys, decided they needed to intervene with my developmental milestone. They told me our cat, Tiger, had been watching my little fish and that the tiny neons needed a bigger protector. They showed me a gorgeous, colorful big fish they'd picked up at the pet store just for me, and told me I could have it and put it in with the neons. I did exactly that, then went to finish my homework before going to bed.

The next day, the only fish left in my bowl was the big fish, but I saw three tiny neon tails floating at the top of the water. The water was a little cloudy. My cousins hadn't bothered explaining to me that the big fish was, in fact, a fighting fish and would obliterate anything in its territory.

I was distraught, but I decided not to go running to my mother.

Instead, the next time I was at their house, I decided I would drop a bar of soap in their very large, very expensive tropical fish tank.

After that they never bothered me again.