Fifth and sixth grade

There are only a few things I remember from these year. The first is I started to taking Orchestra class, I think my teachers name was Mrs. Dunn. I also played basketball in the fifth grade, all the other girls treated me badly because I was poor. There were two girls my age who lived down the street, Sandy and Shannon. Sandy played basketball too and was really mean, so were her parents. My sister and middle brother were playing in the car one day and accidentally put it in neutral. It was an old car that you didn't need the keys to shift it. The driveway was on a slope, so they rolled down the hill into the ditch on the other side of the road. Her Dad was the only one we knew who had a truck and he wouldn't help and was really mean about it. Shortly after we moved in we met the neighbor and my Mom had us call him "Uncle Bill". My cat, a Russian Blue named Smoky, would sit on top of the carport and if he came too far up the driveway she'd pounce on him. He was a bad man who groped me the few times I was alone with him. Smoky always woke me up between two and three in the morning to make rounds. I'd have to go with her and make sure all the doors and windows were closed and locked. One night my Mom caught us. I explained to her that Smoky wouldn't let me sleep if we didn't make the rounds. I also experienced my first pet death at that house. Kyle was a beautiful Blue Merle Collie, he was technically my brothers dog. He'd started getting slow and acting really tired all the time. I asked Mom what was wrong and she said he was old and would probably die soon. The night he died I went outside because somehow I just knew. I layed outside with him all night, both of us covered with my blanket, and he passed away while I slept there with him. I was sad, but I knew he was at peace and that he didn't die alone. Something else I remember is my Dad was working at a factory where they made circuit boards, he scrimped and saved enough to get us a TI99/4A for Christmas. I loved the TI, Dad taught me how to input the codes and save the programs to tape. I usually didn't save them because I liked typing in the code each time. There was one program that made a rocket shoot up and I think a seperate one that did fireworks. They came out with and adapter so you could play atari games on it. My middle brother loved to play Car Wars, he called it crash and burn. The worst thing was when the Challenger accident happened. We all made this model of it in school as a memorial, all the classes did something, it was our class and my fifth grade teachers class. My older brother started changing, he was becoming mean and it was really confusing to me. Where did my big brother go? He was always my protector and my best friend and now he was hitting me for no reason. Oh yeah, one last thing, one our way to school the roads were hilly. Those two years during winter we'd get to running good until we hit an ice patch and then we'd slide across the patch. It was so much fun and the closest thing to ice skating I've ever done.