Lakewood Letters

Who Am I, Really?

My parents were high when they named me. Or drunk. Or..... really big fans? Is that even possible? A boy in third grade told me that I could get sued for having my name, but I never really believed him. Now I wonder, was he right? I remember walking home from school each day followed by taunts and catcalls. Jeers and snickers were my bread and butter it seemed, or so everyone around me seemed to believe anyways.

I didn't grow up in the best neighborhood. Kids were getting beaten by their parents down the street from me and for a while my nextdoor neighbor was the owner of a drug cartel operating out of the port near my house. But then there was a gang fight and somebody died and either it was him or he cleared off because I never saw him again. Then for a while there was this older kid who I rarely saw, living on his own. He kept to himself mostly, except for the time that he bought my entire supply of lemonade for a school thing he was doing and kindly smiled at me as he payed me four times what it costed and told me to keep the change. He moved away when he went to college a year later though and when I left for school two years ago, the house had been abandoned for years.

When I was 12, my best friend Lizzy and I got stopped on the street on our way home from school one day by a couple of buff dudes in ripped, low-hanging pants and no shirts. They grabbed us and shoved us in a car and drove us to an abandoned warehouse somewhere near the shipyard probably. I never found out where it was. I never went looking. I could remember the sound of a belt slipping across cloth and dropping to the floor, followed by the thump of denim every time I saw ripped jeans or a black Mercedes Benz well enough without going back. I could remember Lizzy's screams well enough. I could remember the feeling of someone's hands all over my body, of being stripped and oggled by strangers, of being trapped with nowhere to go, spread out across a dingy bed with handcuffs on my wrists and ancles, of crying and hearing laughter in return. Of a mouth where it shouldn't have been. Of a world I would never see the same again. They knocked us out a few days later when they'd had enough of us, when they'd gotten bored. I remember waking up on my doorstep and running to my parents crying only to be met with a whip for my 'crimes'. And all I remember thinking was "I thought they only did this in places far away from here. Far, far, away." A few months later my parents shipped me off to boarding school, apparently too discusted with me to recognize me as their own. I can tell you the feeling is 100% mutual. I haven't seen them since and I don't mind that one bit.