The Villain You Made Me

Living Hell

When I started going to school Rachel and Jim got pregnant with my half-sister, Elizabeth. She was what took Jim's attention away from me. I took what I could get cause I wanted away from that man. The school was called Stubenville Pugslie Elementary and it was not kind to me. The first memory I have of school I was in class and the teacher had spelled something wrong it wasn't a big deal it was some small word like read but spelled was ae instead of ea. I made the mistake of pointing it out to the teacher and apparently, it damaged her ego and she made me switch my day color directly from green to red. In that school if you had green it meant you were good yellow meant a warning and time-out and red meant time-out and a note home to your parents. That wasn't the first time I had a note home but the second time it happened it was because of the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) at the time it was required that if a case of lice happens in the school parents were notified. Now at this time, it would have been the early 2000s so lice were pretty bad and the school had routine lice checks. A lice check was someone who was employed at the school Typically the office staff and school nurse went and checked everyone's hair in the class while the teacher was teaching and if you had lice they pulled you out of class not very discreetly and called your parents to pick you up. Unfortunately for me, I was pulled multiple times. The first time was fine you washed everything got the doctor's okay and went back to school. Jim and Rachel were of course irritated by this but went with it. By the third time, they were frustrated and Jime shaved my hair. While he did this Rachel was laughing and calling my grandmother to tell her. I didn't know what was going on I just went with it but I also didn't know the ridicule that would come with it.

When I returned to school I assumed it would be normal but instead, my classmates kept telling me I was a boy now. Some girls made fun of me while I was leaving the bathroom saying "You're in the wrong bathroom this one is for girls only, not boys." it was my first introduction to bullying. The rest of those weeks are a blur in my memory.

Until one day we left Jim's house. Jim was at work and one of Rachel's male 'friends' picked us up and took us to Wooster. The next thing I knew I was enrolled in Wooster schools and the same thing that happened in the previous school happened there. The bullying, the lice but this time there was no abuse. I don't remember that boyfriend's name all I knew was I had left hell. Kinda. It was a different kind of torture now. This guy had a dog and I had to share a bed with the dog. I was one of those little boys' race car beds but it had an infestation. Fleas. As if the lice itching wasn't enough I was also being bitten by fleas every night. At that school, the secretary had to drive me home because, shocker, I had lice again. The lice happened so often that my grandparents had invested in one of those lice electrocution combs and lice shampoo. Rachel on the other hand didn't care. The Lice fiasco finally ended.
We moved in and out of a few short-term homes I don't remember most of them. It's hard to remember living in fifty-two houses I do remember one short-term home though and not for a very good reason. It was a trailer with an older couple. The woman was Rachel's few friends and my babysitter. But she wasn't very good at her job. She had taken me to one of those lakes that was sort of a water park. She sat in the grass while I played in the water. Around the time I decided as a six-year-old that couldn't swim, I would go down the water slide she had decided to take a nap. I went down the water slide and went under the water my water shoe got stuck and I couldn't get up luckily one of the older boys that were there noticed and helped me. He even got my water shoe out from where it was. The only good thing to happen in that trailer was the first time I consciously remember watching Beauty and the Beast and Atlantis.

The next time we moved in with some hippie dude in Wooster. He liked to have parties and I was to stay in the attic with a lava lamp. I wish I was kidding. This was the place where Rachel met Travis and Ashley. It was a decent place all things considered but every night if I wanted water I had to navigate around a bunch of twenty-something-year-olds playing beer pong and listening to loud music. I was invited into a game of beer pong once I didn't do the drinking part but I got a few balls in the beer. While we were there Rachel connected with her birth father Tony. He came to see us and one day when everyone was going out he was supposed to watch me and Elizabeth. He left maybe twenty minutes after them. It was the first time I was left to take care of Elizabeth. No one came back for hours. Little did I know that would be the beginning of the parentification.