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Seventh Grade

The picture above was my best friend, Abby.

After the situation with our mother, my sister and I were sent to live with our grandparents. We spent a good couple years there before we found out that our father wanted to see us.

Our dad and grandparents went to court, and Dad was able to see us on Sundays.

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this, considering the fact that my father had been missing from my life two years prior to then.

Nevertheless, my sister and I began spending Sundays with our father at his parents' house.

One day, my dad decided that he wanted full custody over me and my little sister. I came home from school and found my grandma crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that Dad was trying to take me and Maggie from her and my grandpa.

You could only imagine how surprising that fact was for me and my sibling, but how much more shocking it was for us to find that our dad was seeing someone. Her name was Dawn. For privacy reasons, I will not tell anyone her last name.

At first, things were alright. Dawn seemed nice, but it would definitely take some adjusting if I wanted to get used to her being around.

My sister and I would go to Dawn's trailer when getting off the bus after school. She always smelled like smoke, but I tried my best to ignore it. After all, my dad seemed to like her and I didn't want to be standing in the way of their relationship.

Soon enough, Dawn moved in with us. She hadn't married him or been around that long, and neither me nor my sister knew her that well.

Now, it would only be natural for me to dislike this woman who was seemingly taking the place of my mother, correct? Yes. Well, she was kind enough to me at first, but grew less kind as time progressed.

My dad got cancer when I was around eleven years old. At the time, I didn't really think it was that serious. I was so young that I didn't quite understand the consequences and the lasting effect it could have on me and my family. Dad survived his cancer after having chemo therapy.

Meanwhile, things progressively became worse with the whole Dawn situation. She hit me and my little sister. At one point, I even remember her dragging my sibling down the hallway. I became resentful toward the woman. It did make sense if you went through what I did and saw everything I did. That lady was not the nicest person on Earth.

In sixth grade, I began reading books nonstop. I could read a book with over five hundred pages in three days. I buried myself in books. I came home and I read. I went to school and I read. My obsession with books became so bad at that time that I would ignore my family and turn to books. I educated myself with them instead of the real world. This is why I later went on to have problems. I had been living for so long in this little fantasy world that I had built. You know, I read so often that I messed up my eyesight. I was only eleven or twelve when I needed my first pair of glasses.

Middle school was, without a doubt, the worst two years of my life. It was the point that I began shutting myself away from the world little by little (which, later, as you will learn, will come back to bite me in the butt).

I had my first serious crush in seventh grade. It was a point that I was learning what it was like to have feelings for someone. My best friend later admitted that she had the same crush, oddly enough. Her mother told her that our friendship was over. She thought that we would have a fight over who got this boy and that our relationship would crash and burn. Thankfully, this never happened.

I was beginning to find out what mental pain truly was. My best friend that I loved so dearly almost had to move away.

On top of all this, I didn't have the best home life. I came home and basically ignored my family, turning to books. There was a good side to my reading obsession, however. I read about three grades above my reading level. I read at a tenth grade reading level when in reality I was only in seventh grade. I excelled in English class.

Maybe you all don't understand the gravity of the situation. I could read a book with over one thousand pages within about four days. I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in less than three days. I would finish two or three books with over one hundred pages within the span of one day. I read for hours on end, sometimes reading from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. This doesn't include all of the reading I did before I headed to school, on my way to school, during school, and on my way home from school. I believe that my reading obsession is the cause for my eyesight problems. When I would look up from my book, everything was blurry for close to ten minutes. I needed glasses soon after.

Eventually in seventh grade, I was introduced to Creepypasta. That little phase lasted until my freshman year of high school. During this phase, I read different stories as well as listened to them on YouTube. I believe that this had a negative affect on me emotionally and educationally. As I was filling my brain with negative things, I naturally became fairly negative myself, which is a bad thing. I was dedicating myself to finding as much information on different Creepypasta stories, so I obviously wasn't doing so well educationally. I nearly failed my Algebra I class because of pure laziness. I wasn't doing my homework.

Seventh grade was the year that I began listening to rock music regularly. It was the year that I began to have this need to listen to music. It was like I had begun to have an addiction to it.

My best friend mentioned the youth group at her church, but I didn't want to hear about it at first. I had grown up in church and was tired of listening to all of the Bible stories talking about Moses parting the sea or Peter betraying Jesus three times. I didn't want to hear about the Ten Commandments. I probably knew I was sinning, and maybe that was why I disliked church so much at the time.

~Izzy