Decided By Fate (Preview)

Act 1, Chapter 1

The morning glow that erupted out of the sun illuminated the barren flatlands. There wasn't a building for miles, and as far as you could see, it was all hills and prairies. My name is Fate Anderson. There's nothing special about me. I'm just a typical dark-haired girl with shimmering pale green eyes. While sitting in the car, I laid my head back against the headrest, waiting for all of this to end. At the same time, I was drunk on the sensation of moving. My old reality had been crumbling around me. Even when everyone told me, this change would be a good thing overall.

I couldn't bring myself to accept that thought. To me, it was all just another lie waiting to hurt me. The marks on my arms were a clear indicator of the reality that I lived in. I was persistent in believing that my life in the redneck town was better than it ever could be in the big city three hours away. The biggest fear that I had was starting at a new school. Not only was I going into grade eleven after skipping all of grade ten. In the tenth grade, everyone aligned themselves with each other, and cliques were born.

When I got there, I'd be skipping over all that, having absolutely nothing and no one to call my friend. I'd be entirely alone, and my mental state in the condition it was in made everything seem a thousand times worse. It was clear to many people that I was a danger to myself; however, my body was always numb. A part of me still held out some sort of hope. I prayed that maybe someone would make the first move and become my friend.

That was only one of the problems that weighed on my shoulders. The other was my living conditions since they were more unique. It wouldn't make sense to most people, but to me, it was something normal or at least felt normal, to say the least. I wasn't travelling to the city with my biological parents in the car's front seats. Instead, it was my stepfather Hank and his wife, Cherry. It was weird to think about, but my stepfather had been there since the day I was born after my real father abandoned us. He raised me from birth and was the one I had always called dad.

Ever since I was brought into this world, my biological father has been an enigma. He had knocked my mother up and then abandoned her as soon as she told him she was pregnant. They were both young to boot, or so I was always told. My mother was only fifteen then, and my father was in his twenties. It was a messy relationship that my mother had to live with the thought of. Like my own problems and decisions, hers had changed her to a great extent. It almost seemed like she was trying to constantly fill that hole in her heart by finding whomever she could to take home.

Nothing ever worked out, though; men would come and go out of the house almost daily, and when I was old enough, I realized my mother was a prostitute. The only exception to this was Hank, who lasted a good six years with the woman until coming home one day to see her in bed with two other men. It ended there, and he became estranged. He realized that he couldn't satisfy the woman of the child that he helped raise out of respect for her. Yet, unlike my real father, Hank didn't join the circus with my father as my mother had claimed. Instead, he made a better life for himself in the city. He met a decent woman who happily committed herself to the man.

Thankfully, in Hank's eyes, it gave me a way out of the moan-filled house and into a life of potential prosperity. A place where I could work toward being a university student and do something I loved instead of turning into my mother, who had controlled every aspect of my life. While there, I was scared of the men walking into the house. That was when Hank came and picked me up. One of the men that were being aggressively intimate with my mother started giving off weird vibes toward my sixteen-year-old self. It reached the point that I couldn't feel safe in the apartment, no matter what I tried. Not knowing if the next time I woke up, I'd be lying there next to him after he forced himself onto me.

I needed to get away, and that's what I did. When Cherry turned around and smiled at me, we were just shy of the city limits. The cherry red lipstick was synonymous with her name, and the layer she had covering her lips caused them to sparkle. Seeing the slight shimmers of light, I got lost in her smile and almost felt the odd trace of love in my heart.