𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐀 𝐁𝐢𝐠 𝐁𝐚𝐝 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 (𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒀𝒐𝒖)

Chapter One: History Lesson

I am Clarke Praimheda and my first breaths of air came 2 months early in a dark room all alone with no family to call my own, instead of my mother cradling me to her chest my small body was cradled in an incubator with tubes and a life support machine all to keep me alive.

When I was born my birth parents where already dead, my father had shot my mother and her girlfriend who was going to be my other mom before he slit his wrists killing himself in a drunken and drugged out state, the ambulance couldn't save them but they did save me, my mother had been pregnant with me when she died.

I was only 7 months in when the doctors cut me out of my mothers womb and placed me into an incubator, my life depended on the machines the hospital provided and at one click of a button I could have been killed, just like how my moms where, but instead I survived.

At 9 months they took me off life support, deeming me strong enough to keep my own heart going which I did, the local news reports of Adelaide, Australia called me 'The Miracle Baby' because I was the only one to survive the tragedy that struck on March, 7th 1989.

I was in the hospital for months, crawling for the first time as a nurse bribed me on with some jelly turned into taking my first steps with the nurses holding my hands and clapping me on to saying my first word "Appy" as I crawled around with the other baby's in the ward until it was time for me to be put in the adoption system.

I was a year old when I had to say goodbye to the nurses, I don't remember it but they all cried because they had been the only family I had as a child and one of the nurses knew what it was like in the foster system and what could happen if given to the wrong people, she didn't want my life to be like that but unfortunately it was.

I was put into a foster family a month later, I don't remember them but when I was taken away from them when I was 3, the police had found me bruised and bloodied, screaming bloody murder after a round of beating from the foster dad in the garage. The neighbors had called them and they instantly came to investigate, what they did not expect was to find my small, bruised, bleeding and broken body in the cold stone floor.

At 4 I was placed into another family, I was with them for a month before they didn't want me anymore so I was put into the system for another year before being placed with a new family and had to move to America.

I met Alexandria Woods when I was 5, she had green forrest eyes and wavy brunette hair that she always flicked out of her face because it was too long, we where at kindergarten together and she was already 6 by then, only a few months older then myself, I had been sitting alone that day crying because that morning my foster parents had verbally abused and taunted me, Lexa came up to me and offered me a blue flower and placed it into my platinum blond hair while giving me a smile, my electric blue eyes widened at the gesture, no one that I could remember had ever been kind to me besides this girl.

After that we became best friends, we where inseparable and I was usually at her house with her big sister Anya, little brother Lincoln, both of which I had became friends with as well and we all made best friend bracelets together, and their parents Indra and Gustus, Lexa's parents always accepted whenever I asked to come over, I'd learn a decade later it was because she'd seen the bruises I had and just wanted me out of that home but ultimately had no power to put them in jail.

With me bing at Lexa's all the time I'd grown close to each person in her family, her own siblings where like my own and her parents treated me like theirs, it's how it was for 3 years until one night my foster parents had beat me to the point I ran outside screaming because the foster brother started to beat me with his baseball bat that had nails sticking out of it like some horror movie, he was 14 and hit me in the head when I ran out which had made me more wheezy and stumble down the steps.