Chapter 1
How It Used To Be
I almost have enough saved up. Sure, I've been stuck in this shithole for longer than I intended and a lot longer than I liked but hey, life ain't no English paper you can write based on what you got on an outline. Besides, it's not like the extra time I've spent here was a total waste, considering the several extremely gullible girls that pass on through. Plus, it is actually a lot better than some places I've been trapped in. Not that I've ever actually been trapped because I have this magical talent of getting myself out of things. Living on the road teaches you some fancy shit and I've always had a knack for deception and pretend.
Since I walked out on my bitch mother-- who thinks she actually threw me out-- I have been living off of my truck, fourwheeler and whatever crap job I can get along the way. I never really liked living in the Olympic Peninsula anyway. It is freaking gloomy and boring there and I actually started bird watching. My step-dad is a huge business owner up there but he keeps under the radar because The Man don't like his kind of trade. It is always raining and when the sun peeks out, it lasts just long enough for you to get your swimming trunks on and drive way the hell out to the beach before it goes behind black clouds and lets a storm take over.
Beside the weather always being on its period, my mother is a total psycho bitch who, honest to God, is schizophrenic. She didn't used to be so bad when I was young. Even after my dad found out she was smoking some crack and divorced her, she still seemed like an actual mom to me. It wasn't until I hit my freshman year, when she met Ray, that we began to separate. And to tell the truth, I don't know if it was me or her doing the separating. Or maybe, we were being wedged apart because she liked the guy and I didn't. Either way, in seventh grade, my mother met Raymond Parker through an old friend and they had a "connection" as she put it. With my mom, it took only a few hours for him to get her in his hotel room with her face in the carpet and her bare ass in the air. Except, after the first time, he stuck around. Unlike the other boyfriends she'd had, I noticed that he never hit her and never called her the nasty things I always did. He protected her from other dicks even when they weren't technically dating. He did yell at her, though, and over stupid shit like his shoes; they had to be ordered by color and then, if needed, style. He thought he was the best at everything and because my mom agreed with him, I'd get my ass beat if I didn't too. My mom turned into a drug addict because that was his trade: illegal possession and distribution of controlled substances. With her eyes always an abnormal color, her breath never clean and legs always unstable, she stopped making me dinner, stopped doing my laundry, stopped asking me to clean my room, stopped waking me up to go to school. Because this happened over a series of weeks, I didn't really notice until those few times when Ray was getting low on supplies and she hadn't had a drink or joint in days and I'd find her folding my clothes or making my bed. Then I would be all like, whoa, what got into you? Sometimes she'd be nice but most of the time, especially as I got older and she'd had three stillborns, she became a monster and hurled glass and shit at me as if I'd been the one that smoked all the pot or drank all the booze. Ray enjoyed this part the most: being able to treat me like a dirty rug. To get away from all that, I was involved in a sport for every term and even in some plays and shit when sports were done and I still had some time to kill. I got tall, really tall, and I fell in love with the weight room at school. At first, I could barely lift the damn bar but now, my max in bench is pushing three-sixty.
Ray didn't like it when I punched back. He especially hated it when I got too big and too strong to kick around. It absolutely pissed him off when I turned the tables and beat his ass black and blue. That's when my mom really started to get in it because she couldn't handle the fact that someone was better than her precious Ray-Ray.
My mother had never slapped me before.
I left when I'd had enough of his shit, her shit and all the shit that his "customers" brought in. Plus, they had about two kids and both of them have a screw loose. I been in severe trouble with the law, my grades were nonexistent so far as I was concerned and both of the chicks I'd been banging had gotten pregnant. Once I'd stolen enough dough from Ray's stash, I packed up my shit and left without a plan but not caring.
