Living in what she calls “the pink house,” Lauren’s life appears ordinary at first glance. She removes some of the clothes that are strewn around her room from the couch, laughing as her dog darts around the room. She balances her classes at Seattle Central Community College with working three or four days a week at La Rustica, an Italian restaurant. Yet there’s one palpable difference: there are no parents around.

It’s every kid’s dream: living with friends, having no parents around, no curfew, no rules, no expectations. Many a family feud in my house ends with me screaming, “I don’t need you! Why can’t I just move out?” My parents then, of course, counter with the fact that I don’t have a job or a car and that my cooking abilities are limited to pasta and frozen foods.

Lauren, a Garfield senior, made the decision to move out last year with the encouragement of her father. “My dad asked me last summer if I wanted to move out because he doesn’t think he’s a very good parent,” she says. “And then this year I was doing well in school, at Central, for the first time ever and all of a sudden I was here.” Now she lives with four roommates, mostly college-aged, in a house in Wallingford.

Despite the fact that she has a job, Lauren receives financial assistance from her father in the form of rent money. “I kind of just see him to get money, which is kind of mean, but it’s true,” she says. Since Lauren is not legally emancipated, however, her father is still required to support her.

Washington State doesn’t require a minor to live on his or her own in order to be legally emancipated. If one chooses to seek emancipation, though, it’s a long, arduous process that requires the minor to be at least sixteen and to prove he or she is able to handle his or her own financial, educational, personal and social affairs. After a teen is legally emancipated, he or she gains the right to live alone and the right to enter into binding contracts. But there are also the negatives, like the fact that such teens parents no longer have to support them. That’s why Jeremy*, a sophomore, has decided against seeking full emancipation.

Jeremy started running away from home at age thirteen. “It was fun, and also a way to get out of my house,” he says. “I really didn’t want to be there because of problems at home, kind of abuse. Emotionally, just too much yelling and stuff.” Jeremy would return home either by choice or by way of the police and Child Protective Services. The runaways occurred so often that his parents filed a petition that would make the consequences more severe the next time he ran away. But this didn’t stop Jeremy, and after a fight with his mother turned violent he ran away again and made it down to Oregon.

“My mom came and picked me up about a week later and she had my two aunts in the car,” says Jeremy. “We drove up and they bought me McDonalds, I don’t know why. But we passed our house and went all the way downtown and they said I was going to juvy.” Thus began his nearly yearlong odyssey. From November of his eighth grade year, when he first checked into a group home, through the next April, Jeremy’s life was a continuous cycle of communal living and moving.

The moving brought Jeremy to a number of very different homes. Some were correctional facilities; others were like big foster homes. “My first impression [of group homes] was that this is cool, like camp,” Jeremy says. “I liked it for a while ’cause there were a lot of new people there. It was an adventure, something different.” But it soon became just another environment of rules and restrictions, a place where Jeremy was even less free to do what he wanted. “I always thought home was ten times worse than anything else could be, but group homes actually got pretty damn bad,” says Jeremy.

Jeremy has lived at home since the summer before ninth grade, but he has plans to get out again. “Throughout my whole entire life there’s always been something or I’ve always been hoping for a better place.” He says a move like his has scarred everybody: his parents, his brother, his sisters. “My dad doesn’t like me anymore like at all, but he never really liked me anyways,” he says. Jeremy’s lived with friends before, and says he’s looking at that option again but concedes that finding friends to live with can be challenging.

Since Lauren is eighteen, there are no circumstances that could legally require her to move back home, and she has no plans to. Yet while she loves living in her new house, she has noticed many differences beyond the lack of parents. “I got a dog, Pierre, because I was really lonely,” she says as Pierre, an adorable puppy, bounds around the room. “Also, this house is known as the party house too so it’s kind of an issue some times. I’ve had tons of stuff stolen: my iPod, my speakers, my phone. People have gotten [charged with] Minors in Possession and [had their] cars stolen and stuff. This is a house where police come and it can kind of be a problem.”

How bad does home life have to be to make it wise to live in a situation where your belongings and, in a way, your reputation can be at risk? As much as many of us want it, how many high schoolers are really grown up and mature enough to effectively balance school, work, food and everything else without a little adult guidance? I, for one, know that when my parents throw my obvious incompetence back at me I tend to slink away, hoping that someday I’ll be able to live on my own. Maybe that “someday” stays vague for a reason.

*Name has been changed