ᴄʜᴜᴄᴋɪᴇ ▲ ʙɪʟʟ ᴄɪᴘʜᴇʀ

𝟷. ᴀ ɢɪʀʟ ɴᴀᴍᴇᴅ ᴄʜᴀʀʟᴏᴛᴛᴇ ʀᴀʏ

At first, I did not know a whole lot of things.

I knew simple things: physical things. Feelings.

Random facts: like what year World War 2 started or various math formulas.

I knew how to write, how to move my body, and how to speak.

I knew how to swim, how to dance, and even how to do a back spring—oddly enough.

But I did not know things like where I was born, how old I was, or even who my parents were.

I didn't know what my favorite dessert was, I couldn't remember the songs I loved or happy Christmas memories.

When I tried to think back on anything from before waking up in that cold rain all I found was a strong wall of nothingness.

In a nutshell, I did not know anything about myself other than that my name is Charlotte Ray—but I go by Chuckie—and one night I just appeared somewhere along State Route 66 outside of Holbrook, Arizona.

A small shithole desert town with a population barely scraping 4,000.

Anything from before waking up in the cold rain on the dusty desert ground was lost. I have no fucking clue how I got there nor from whence I came.

So that in itself was already weird.

Eventually, after the kindness of a few strangers—locals of Holbrook—I was reported to the state.

Another oddity: there was nothing. Absolutely zilch in the system for who I was. No record of a Charlotte Ray who matched my description.

They tried fingerprints, dental records, and other random DNA testing.

Charlotte Ray simply did not exist, according to 'Uncle Sam' at least. There was no matching DNA of anyone either—I had no family.

After countless examinations, the state deemed me to be somewhere between 16-18 years old. There is no reliable way to identify a person's age without a birth certificate, after all. To stay on the safe side, they decided to classify me as sixteen.

It set me up for success because rather than be kicked onto the streets and add to the already crippling homeless population, I was placed in foster care.

Seeing as I knew how to drive, and it felt as though I had known for a while, I had an ebbing suspicion that I was older than the state deemed me. After all, no 16-year-old should know how to drive as well as I do, but then again, at this rate, I'd never know for sure how old I was.

For the two weeks from when I first appeared to when the state performed DNA tests on me, a kind waitress named 'Sharon' whom I had met on my first night allowed me to crash on her couch.

Once the state deemed me to be sixteen years of age: I was shipped off.

In two years and with an extreme case of amnesia, I ventured from the coast of California to the plains of Texas and even as far as the coldest parts of Alaska. I'd even surfed the waves of Hawaii for the short few weeks I was posted there.

Oh yeah—I also knew how to surf.

Cool, right.

Different families took me in under the pretense of the foster system: people I would live with for weeks to months.

But I never stayed anywhere longer then four or five months—not many people were interested in adopting such an old teenager.

When I inevitably turned 18, I was deemed an official adult and rid of the system. I was living in Chicago when my state-given birthday occurred. The same day that I first woke up on the side of the interstate in the cold rain.