Home is where her heart is

Between bites of a hastily made sandwich that serves as dinner for the night, Alyssa Perez scoops her puppy, Snickers, off the couch and cradles her in an affectionate embrace.

She would be content to sit there for the rest of the evening with the 18-month-old Labrador mix nestled in her lap, but there isn’t time -and Snickers is too wound up to stay still anyway.

The excitable pooch has already devoured a chew toy and most of her favorite stuffed teddy bear before getting snared in Alyssa’s hug. Her tail thumps wildly against a sofa cushion, and Snickers, still in the mood to play, finally wiggles free and bounds around a coffee table in search of something else to chew on.

“She’s my baby,“ Alyssa says fondly.

Then she shakes her head helplessly and laughs as Snickers spies a knotted rope on the floor and tries to coax her into a game of tug-of-war.

But playtime must wait. In a half-hour, Alyssa has to go to work. There are bills and rent to pay, so the 17-year-old Gar-Field High School senior climbs slowly out of her comfortable seat and prepares for another evening shift.

On this particular day, she’ll spend several hours serving as a childcare provider at the Health & Sports Club in Dale City. When she isn’t there, Alyssa can usually be found across the parking lot working at Dom-ino’s Pizza.

She’d prefer to have more time for Snickers—or her Quantico Marine boyfriend for that matter—but that isn’t an option right now. While most of her classmates are making plans for the prom or a trip to the beach during spring break, Alyssa works two jobs. It is a sacrifice she makes willingly because the alternative is unthinkable.

“I do not want to go back to a homeless shelter,“ she said. “We’re not going back there.“

MAKING IT ON HER OWN

Alyssa was only a small child, perhaps 2 years old, the first time her family sought temporary housing at a shelter in Fairfax County. Her mother, Maria, had just filed for divorce and they had no place else to go.

Now that she is old enough to understand what being homeless really means, Alyssa is determined to keep her fam-ily from returning to a shelter—even if it requires sharing a second-floor apartment with a friend and working two part-time jobs.

“I guess it’s never been like I was a kid. I don’t blame anyone for that,“ she said. “I’ve always been older than what I really am.

“A lot of my friends know I work two jobs and that I live by myself and they’re like, ‘Wow, really. I wish my parents would let me live by myself.‘ It’s cool because I can stay out on weekends as late as I want but it’s like I still have to get up and go to school and I still have to go to work. It has its bene-fits, but it has its downfalls.“

The biggest drawback is that, for the second time in Alyssa’s life, the Perezes don’t have a home.

Maria raised three children—Alyssa, 15-year-old Brittney and 19-year-old Christopher—on her own with the help of child support and a subsidized housing voucher that allowed her to pay 30 percent of her income toward rent. But after her ex-husband died last spring, she lost the voucher in August because of what she described as a filing er-ror.

“For 14 years I followed the rules. I just made this one mistake,“ said Maria, who moved her family to Prince William County in 2006 following Alyssa’s sophomore year at Edison High School.

“Before their father died, he went to jail and the child support stopped, so I reported that I wasn’t getting any more,“ she said. “When he got out, I forgot to tell them for three months and they took my voucher for that.“

Maria offered to pay back the extra $150 that she received but she couldn’t get the voucher back and the family could no longer afford its house in Dale City, where Brittney and Christopher are now staying with an aunt, and Maria is sharing an apartment with a friend.

“Every other day my youngest daughter calls me and cries,“ Maria said. “I’m running out of words to tell my children. I’ve told them, ‘Just a little while longer.‘ It makes me feel like I’m a bad mom, but I know I’m not.

“I raised my kids by myself after I left their father and it was hard but I did it. I had my first kid when I was 27 years old. I wasn’t 15 or 16. But I couldn’t stand for an abusive husband either. … Everybody said to stay because of the kids, but I couldn’t do that.“

Maria’s days are now spent commuting to and from Alexandria in a 1988 Chrysler New Yorker to work as a dispatcher for a taxi cab company, while Alyssa is attempting to complete her final year of high school and hold down two part-time jobs.

“I don’t feel like the goals that I want in life have been cut short. I would say my childhood was cut short,“ said Alyssa, who once worked as a live-in nanny when she was 15. “Sometimes it bothers me. Sometimes I want to be a kid, go to a sleepover and hang out with friends at a party or something. But usually I’m too tired or too busy.“

Even with the majority of her time occupied by work and trying to solve bothersome algebra II equations, Alyssa pauses momentarily to dream. She wants to attend nursing school or, possibly, become a full-time daycare provider. She even allows herself to ponder the idea of marriage.

But she is firmly grounded in the present and insists that the main reason she set out on her own is because she wants to make sure that Brittney, who is now a sophomore at Gar-Field, doesn’t have to worry about her future.

“It’s mainly for my little sister,“ Alyssa said. “It bothers her that I moved out, but I can’t really do anything about it. I’m trying to do this so we don’t have to go to a shelter. She’s angry with me because I’m not so much involved in her life anymore. It’s taken a toll on our relationship.

“Sometimes I feel like my mom can’t always be there and that’s not her fault,“ Alyssa said. “So it’s like I’m part sister and part mom. She doesn’t like it because she’s always been the baby and always been spoiled and now she feels like she’s not being loved. I’m very protective of her but from where I am now I can only be so protective.“

IT ONLY HURTS FOR A WHILE

Alyssa understands the anger her sister feels. There are occasions when she feels it too.

In the past eight months, she’s suffered three anxiety attacks and she wonders if life will ever be as carefree as it once was when she was part of the “Mount Eagle Crew” in elementary school.

“When we said that, everybody knew who we were talking about,“ she said of the childhood group of friends she hung out with at Mount Eagle Elementary School.

In some ways, the kid in Alyssa still exists. It’s just buried underneath all the responsibilities that came too quickly and early in her life.

“Sometimes, it’s overwhelming. Sometimes I’m angry and it’s not at certain things. It’s just, you know, there’s people that don’t understand,“ Alyssa said. “Last sum-mer I pretty much did whatever I wanted to. Now I have a budget. I have to put money away. I don’t get to go to the movies. Now I’m paying bills and I have rent. I have things I have to take care of. With three kids I wouldn’t be able to do this. It’s crazy. I can understand what my mom went through by her-self.“

If circumstances were different, Alyssa might be playing varsity softball again this spring, but she has traded in her athletic career for more adult duties - selflessly sacrificing her own desires to assist her family in a time of cri-sis.

“Alyssa’s first words when she was 10 months old were ‘Thank you.‘ She’s al-ways been an intelligent kid,“ Maria said. “She was an honor roll student from third grade up.“

And despite some issues with math, she is still excelling in the classroom. On June 6, Alyssa will receive her high school diploma and she hopes to enroll at Northern Virginia Community College in the fall.

“I’m just trying to figure out how to come up with $6,000 for tuition,“ she said. “I know there’s hope for financial aid and I know there’s hope for grants, but I don’t want to take out a student loan because I don’t like the idea of having to pay money back. That’s just another bill and I don’t want that.“

What Alyssa does want is for her family to be together again under one roof, and she’s willing to give up a little bit more of her childhood to accomplish that.

“I fall a lot. I get knocked down a lot but I’m good at picking myself up,“ she said. “I get a lot of that from my mom.

“How I look at it is, once you hit rock bottom you don’t have anywhere to go but up. You don’t have anything to do but start climbing. You can dig but you’re not going anywhere. We’ve hit rock bottom. We’ve done it once or twice. It’s nothing new. It’s not something I’m scared of. It hurts for a while, but there’s always hope.“

Staff writer Dave Utnik can be reached at 703-878-8051.