Starbright (Ashley Purdy)

The Beginning

I never understood the concept of living. What was it exactly? Fighting, struggling, to get the bare necessities? To have a good life, a nice roof over your head, to get a husband, was that living? Or was it going out with friends, getting drunk, having careless sex that would probably leave you diseased for the rest of your life? I could never decide between the two. Neither were good to me. Neither tempted me.

To Kenzi Miller, life was dying. It was going out at two in the morning, finding the most dangerous looking man, going home with him, taking unknown drugs. I'd drag myself out of my bed to find her, puking in a garbage bin in an alley, bruised and left for dead, or abandoned a side corner with ripped stockings. She never cried, though, and I wondered if she enjoyed the brutality expressed towards her. She kept going out to find this pain, so I assumed she did.

So, I babied Kenzi through our young years. She never got herself together, even now at twenty nine, but I didn't mind. She gave me something to do, something to feel useful over. There was nothing for me outside of Kenzi and her death wish. 

"You're too good for me, Mads." She whispered every night as I helped her out of a soiled mattress in a warehouse, a broken down car, an alley. Even if she couldn't convey how grateful she was of my presence in her life, I could see it in her blue eyes. Every time they glazed over, tears brewing under the surface, I understood that if it weren't for me, she would be dead.

To me, life was, as simple as, living. But to people like Kenzi Miller? It was more complicated. It was hard to grasp onto, to climb up, to break the surface and take a refreshing breath of air. That's why they needed people who believed in life.

That's why Ashley needed me.