The Girl In Black

Prologue

My name is Rose and when I was just a little girl at the age of six years old, I started to get beaten and yelled at. Before that my Mom has had many other boyfriends but we never lived with them. We would move a lot and stay with some of her friends most of my life. Everything wasn't that bad until Mom told me we were moving in with her new boyfriend. At first they got along really well and Sam, her boyfriend would be super nice and give me little candies. Until one night when my Mom didn't come pick me up from kindergarden. My Mom's friend didn't pick me up until it was really dark and all the streetlamps had turned on. She dropped me off at Sam's apartment and told me what had happened so I wouldn't be worried. It turns out my Mom was in the hospital because some guy in a bar wanted to sleep with her but she refused, so he beat her. When she returned from the hospital a few days later Sam was drunk and once she walked through the door he hit her. Accused her of cheating on him and after that day Mom and her boyfriend would fight after he had drank a beer or two and hit her. Not just one time, he would hit her until she couldn't stand, couldn't talk, and could barely see or breathe. One time I told him to stop because he was hurting her but I was so scared my knees were shaking and I could barely speak. I said, "Stop hitting my mommy, she didn't do anything" "You don't know what she has and hasn't done kid, now go sit down and shut your mouth for the rest of the night." After that day he would first hit my mom and once she had fallen down or blacked out he would hit me too. Once he fell asleep on the couch I would hide in my moms closet and cry since I didn't have a room or bed of my own. I stopped going to school because people would have gotten suspicious. Everyone of my Mom's friends would stop by and worry but, she would just put on a fake smile and reassure them that everything was all ok. She would tell everyone how I was starting homeschool. Nobody except for me and her knew what was really happening and that it was all lies. That happened every day for almost a year. Then my mom found me in the closet one night and she told me we were going to visit an old friend of hers who lives far away. So we left and never went back to that small apartment ever again. Soon after we left on the bus, I came to the realization that things would either get better or a whole lot worse...