Crânio Borboleta (COMPLETED)

Chapter One

Juliette

   I was seven when it happened. When one of the many happened. My parents hardly ever got along. My biological parents, that is. My father was an abusive drunk. My mother was a spiritual, gorgeous soul with an amazing voice and a bubbling personality. I still don't, to this day, understand how they thought it would be an amazing idea to get married.

Though my mother never told me, I knew my father was abusing her. She wouldn't dare let him lay a finger on me, so she took the physical and emotional pain herself. I would see knew bruises and cuts on her face when I would come home from school.

And though she forbade him from hitting me, when she would be gone, he'd hit me with his belt and scream at me and smash things beside my ears which caused me to have worse of a hearing problem than I already did.

When I was born, I could hear, but I couldn't hear the way everyone else did. Then my father made it worse by shooting his gun kind of close to my ear, or breaking bottles or smashing things or just screaming at me. So I used my iPod filled with music and my earbuds to drown them out. I also could perfectly read someone's lips. No matter how bad they were at it.

My mother always made sure I was beautiful. I looked just like her - fawn straight hair, blue-green eyes, full lips, a million freckles on our entire body, tan skin because we were Hungarian, long eyelashes, dimples under our eyes when we smiled, and a small button nose. I loved that I looked like my mother. She was the most gorgeous human being on the entire planet. My father was just gray and wrinkly. He didn't take care of himself much.

I hated that my mother cared for me so much. It just made the thought of that  day more awful than it already was...

My parents and I were leaving my mother's parents house after a family cookout, and, as usual, my father was drunk. My mother was driving because he was too unstable to drive, and they were just screaming  at each other. I had my earbuds in like every minute of every hour of every day, but I could still hear them over my music. My mother hardly looked on the road because she was so angry at my father, then my father punched her and that's when I saw the semi truck heading right for us on a four-way intersection.

. . .

Everything went black.

When I woke, I was in a hospital bed and being told my parents hadn't made it. That they were somehow impaled by the equipment the semi was carrying.

Little gruesome for a seven-year-old little girl.

I was put into foster care, but my grandmother - my mother's mother - adopted me for a few months until she died a week after my eighth birthday. Then I was put back until a deaf, black man by the name of George adopted me. He had a wife named Winona who wasn't fond of me, and a ten-year-old son named Sean who wasn't fond of me either. Neither of them were deaf. They also had a golden retriever named Vern... He was my escape. Him, and the attic.

I didn't like the fact that half of my family didn't like me, but George and Vern loved me, and that's really all I needed. Winona and Sean didn't help celebrate my birthday's to come, but George and Vern did, and that made me very happy. But what was one of the hardest things of all was that Winona and Sean called me "that girl" or "it" instead of "Juliette" or "Jules".

Sean had given me a book called "The Lost Boy" by a man who wrote it about his life being abused as a child when I was eleven.

"That's gonna be you, someday," Sean had told me after I read it, then he shoved me against the wall and walked off.

One of my worst fears was to be abused because of my father. My foster family didn't know that, but I had  confided in Vern because he promised he wouldn't tell anyone. He was my only friend for a very long time.

As the years passed, I became involved in sports and learning different languages - like sign language which I had to learn for George - and honor classes and such, because George encouraged me to try new things and be involved in things to make more friends, and I did. I had many, many friends. I wasn't considered "popular" in middle school, but I had popular friends. It was okay.

Everyone always considered me as that "outgoing, funny, obnoxious, crazy, super fun" girl. But little did they know that inside, I just wanted to escape everyone and everything. And as the next year came up, I wanted it even more.