When Life Gives You Lemons

Prologue

They say it takes a village to raise a child, but in my case, they wrote me off as a lost cause. I grew up learning house-hold skills from my mother, and social skills from my friends (as if it was done any differently).

It didn't matter how old I was now, though, I still had the mentality of a child. And since I was going into the eleventh grade, that was a very bad thing.

My grades were near perfect. I graduated from elementary school with honours in every subject. But high school wasn't that easy.

Everyone there, whether I knew them or not, knew who I was. I was the girl who'd been reported missing so many times that the police station knew exactly who I was, where I lived, my friends, my family, and my enemies.

Why had I been reported missing so many times? To my mother's dismay, I had a habit of sleep-walking into the forest behind our house in the middle of the night.

I had done this so many times that my father installed a dead-bolt lock on my door that could only be unlock from the outside. But the idea failed when I sleep-jumped out the window of my second story bedroom and broke my leg. So now, my window also gets locked when I go to bed.

Because of my... condition, I can't have sleep-overs at any of my friends' houses, they have to come here and sleep in my room with me.

Although, after the window accident, my parents became permanently convinced that I was suicidal and enrolled me in therapy with the best therapist in the city. Well, that was a waste of time...

The therapist - Dr. Young - tried to pressed every detail entrapped in my mind to try to get me off my "suicidal night doings". I knew I wasn't suicidal, but unfortunately, she wouldn't believe me.

Thursdays are now my most hated day of the week because of my weekly therapy sessions. The rents gave up on driving me as it was a waste of gas because we conveniently lived about twenty walking minutes away.

Every Thursday night, we get a phone call around dinner time, notifying them that I had skipped my appointment - again. I was pretty sure that now my parents had written my off as a lost cause, too, but my twenty-four year old sister Jeniece still had hope in me, I could seen it in her eyes.

Jen lived alone in her apartment above a bookstore downtown. That was my place of refuge when I didn't want to be at home anymore. She was always happy to take me in for a night or two. The catch was that she wasn't my biological sister, she had been adopted at birth.

She knew I wasn't really her sister, and that my parents weren't really hers. They had explained it to her when she was eighteen and she ran away. They didn't know where she was, and she never said where she had gone, but she came back three days later with an open mind and a bigger heart.

Long story short, my family was really strange. But of the four of us, I took the cake for oddest child.

My name is Sarah-Jane Maria Smith and I am...