I never really thought of my life as something extraordinary. I always thought that I would end up like my mother. My mother was in no way a good mother, but the type that shot up on every weekday and was too high on the weekends to come out of her bedroom. I think it is needless to say we didn't see much of each other. I saw her every other Wednesday, just to make sure she still had food in the cabinets, but mostly all I ever found was syringes, bongs, pregnancy tests, and the occasional pill bottle. She wasn't very picky, my mother. She would take just about anything a man would give her. In exchange for the pills, dope, and other drugs she would give them favors and I doubt I need to go into detail about that.
I moved out of her home at the ripe old age of 14 when one of her "friends" tried to touch me. It wasn't the first time one of them had tried to touch me but it was the first time that had almost succeeded. Most of the time they were too high or too drunk to catch me. This one was different though. He was competently coherent while my mother was high and drunk sprawled out on the couch without a bra and only a towel wrapped around her lower half.
It used to make me angry seeing my mother like that. When I was younger I would lay in my small little bed and hear her making noises and screaming, sometimes even breaking things. I used to get so angry that she didn't look at me the way she did the men she was with. I used to get mad she didn't love me like she loved her drugs and her sex, but by the time I moved out I didn't care because I knew that she didn't have anything. She had no money, she had no sense and she had no love.
After moving out of my mother's house I moved in with my best friend Madelyn. I had known Madelyn since the day I was born. We used to be neighbors before her parents moved because of the rising crime in the community. They moved to South-side, the riches part of the city. So I think it is needless to say I became a suburbanite when I move in with her. Her parents treated me like one of their own. We went on vacation together, I went to their family reunion, they even tried to adopt me, but that fell through because my mother was too much of a bitch to give up custody. So instead they continued to treat me like one of their own and pay for my every want and need just like they did Madelyn.
Madelyn and I were practically attached at the hip. We cheered together, played basketball, we went everywhere together. We shared everything, except attractiveness and boyfriends.
Madelyn was one of those girls that any guy would love to get in bed with. She had a body like something out of a dream and perfect tan skin and beautiful red hair to match. She honestly looked like something out of a Playboy magazine, then there was me. I wasn't like ugly or anything. I was shorter than Madelyn, pale skin, brown hair, brown eyes, normal in weight, nothing exceptionally beautiful whatsoever, but that wasn't the reason I didn't attract guys. The reason I didn't attract guys was because everyone knew where I came from. To them I was West-side trash who's mother sold herself out. No boys mother wanted her son to date someone whose mother was a prostitute. When I was 15 a boy I had liked asked me to come over to his house and study for Biology with him. I was so excited because when you are 15 studying doesn't mean studying, it means cuddling on the couch watching a movie and maybe getting a first kiss.
I was so excited. Madelyn helped me do my hair and throw together a cute outfit that Friday. The plan was to go over to his house right after school, but we didn't even make it that far. That day at lunch the boy came up to me with his head down and told me he had to cancel on me. When I asked why he explained it all to me.
It turns out that half of the boys in the tenth grade were interested in me but had been told to stay away from me by their parents. "People like her are tainted. She probably will grow up and be just like that woman." These are the things I heard when people talked about me. I learned to eavesdrop really well, and sometimes I heard things so hurtful I wish I didn't have ears.
I used to come home at night and fall asleep crying with Madelyn laying there hugging me. It hurt her almost as bad as it hurt me I think. She hated seeing me like that and sometimes it was too much for her and she started crying with me. One night I heard her talking to her mom. She was begging to move, not for her sake, but for mine. We didn't end up moving, but it didn't really bother me after my junior year that boys weren't interested in me. I was so focused on sports and had a new found love for writing that I wouldn't have had time to fit a boy into my schedule. I became editor of the school newspaper and Madelyn and I both made All State for cheer and basketball our junior and senior year.
The summer after our senior year was both the best and the wort summer of my life. Madelyn got a cheer scholarship to University of Alabama, where both her parents graduated from.I on the other hand went to University of Arkansas and graduated with a degree in journalism and publishing. After graduation I moved across the south to Texas. I moved in the middle of July, probably the hottest month ever recorded. The heat wasn't as bad as the lack of rain. I bought a two bedroom house in a the small community of Rainbow. I thought that living in this small place would give me inspiration to blog and begin writing my first novel. Little did I know that Rainbow was the beginning of the rest of my life.
