Gray Ghost - License to Kill

Chapter 2 - Making of a Ghost

Every person is a product of their environment. Your very being is a product of the things you learned as a kid. The things you saw. The things you were taught, and the values instilled in you. Many like to tell of the fantasy about how somebody escaped the hood and went on to become this great person. That is true in fairy tales and movies, but in real life you don't ever escape the hood.

You may at some point make enough money to move out of the hood physically, but your mind never escapes the hood. Your mind can not unsee the things you saw, unlearn the things you learned, nor change the experiences you had. You carry them with you all the days of your life.

The only difference is the ability for each person to compartmentalize those things. Do you guide your life using those things as learning experiences? Or do those learning experiences guide your life. You see the former are people that go on to have meaningful lives and become productive citizens. The latter, those are the ones that are screwed up in the head and never leave the hood physically or emotionally.

And then you have me. I was the one that was able to guide my life using those things as learning experiences. Except the only problem, those doors to certain compartments in my mind, they seemed to be too easily stimulated, triggering things with thoughts from the past.

I was born into a world with teenage parents in the hood. Lindsay Stewart was a cute little girl with a promising future. Growing up on the east side of Dekalb County she stood out like a sore thumb. She was smaller than most kids her age. She was a book worm that enjoyed things other kids in her neighborhood didn't. She was loved by her teachers and was always the top student in her class, no matter the class.

At the age of three, she taught herself how to speak Spanish by simply watching television. By the time she was in kindergarten, she was reading in classes with third graders. She was a person that if born in the lavish neighborhoods of Buckhead, she would have been destined to be a CEO or President of the United States. But she was born and raised on the dirty streets of Candler Road in Dekalb County. Being smart and ambitious wasn't always enough to escape these streets.

When she was in the first grade, the most important thing she was learning at school every day was survival.

"Look at her, she thinks she better than everybody else. Teacher's pet" she heard as she was entering the cafeteria. That comment was a no-win situation in the hood. If you ignored them and kept walking, they feel disrespected as if you don't even respect them enough to challenge them.

If you turned and said something back, that was inviting them to become more aggressive and likely physical. That was the mind of a bully picking on somebody that couldn't fight back. But, mom was a very small kid, so she chose to ignore them in hopes she could walk away and they would not pursue.

Then suddenly, she was hit in the back of the head with a milk carton. It knocked her down and milk went all over her head and clothes. She laid on the floor for a second and could feel the milk running down her face. She could hear kids giggling and running away.

A teacher saw her on the ground and came over to help her up.

"What happened Lindsay" she said to her.

Mom just looked at her as tears formed. What was the point of even telling her what happened. Something like this happened almost every day, and nothing was ever done. All the kids would pretend they did not know who did it. All of the teachers would say there was nothing they could do if you didn't see who did it. And everybody went about their day like nothing happened except this little six-year-old girl that had nowhere to turn to protect her from the bullies.

Day after day, week after week, it was the same thing. Somebody picking on her just for being different. When you grow up in the hood, teachers and administrators didn't care enough to try and address the bullying, most of them just wanted to get a check and get the hell away from all these bad kids.