Mylah Gray: Descendants of Camelot

I Make A Friend

I've never really been much of a story teller.

As a girl who's lived her entire life in fear, I've learned to keep quiet bout a lot of things. Seeing on-going drug deals, a threat of murder, how those bruises showed up in patches all over my skin, even how a school that should be closed is still running.

Until I was 15, those were the only kind of secrets I had to keep. And while they were dangerous, life threatening secrets, they were nothing compared to the secrets I learned my Sophomore year of high school. Funny enough, they had nothing to do with high school.

Stories, I've learned, were once never recorded by paper and pen. Books and scrolls and things of the sort have come around in the past few hundred years, and even then not everything is correctly recorded. Information is changed, truth is construed to be myth, and false information is provided to cover the real story.

My father is a prime example of this.

Until the summer after my Sophomore year, my father didn't exist. In more ways than just him not being around. As far a I knew for the first 15 years of my life, a mysterious man I didn't know the name of came into my 17-year old mothers life, and they quickly fell in love. 4 months and no condom later, surprise! You're pregnant!

Mystery man stuck around for the 9 months my mother carried me. After finding out my mother was pregnant, her parents promptly kicked her out and banished her from ever being in their presence ever again. So, my father and mother lived in a small house in a small town called Lucan. And here we have lived since.

Elaine Gray, my mother, has been through hell and back since. She'd never fallen in love again after my father disappeared, though I can personally attest to her trying an failing, having had to see her long string of abusive, dirty, controlling, putrid ex-boyfriends I've had to deal with on more than one occasion.

Because of this, I've come to learn to be able to take care of myself. After too many bad experiences as a kid, you have to.

When I was around 4-years old, I made a friend named Doc. An odd name for a kid, or for anyone, really, but it fit him. And that was what everyone knew him as. I don't think anyone knew his last name, or if they did they don't remember it anymore. Which is an odd thing to forget about someone who supposedly died.

Doc was the most intriguing person I've ever known, to this day. He was the one who taught me how to fight, and he was also the person who taught me a sense of humour.

And then, when I was 8, he went away on a vacation, and he came back an entirely different person. No more was the boy who was laughing, care-free, and wanted to do everything he could do to protect me. Back came the bully of all bullies, ready to all but have my he's on a stake of he could. What instigated the change I wasn't sure, but as I've said- you learn to protect yourself.

And then, the fire.

One day when I was 10 and he was 12, he was out torturing me-I can remember the fight like it was yesterday, though it was 5 years ago- Doc's house caught fire, his entire family in it. Supposedly, according to the police report, Doc was in the house as well, but I remember. And in my heart, I know he's still out there.

Since, in this poor, seedy town I call home, I'd been seen as the crazy girl who still believed her dead best friend was alive. Which was fine by me, it kept the creeps away. What it didn't keep away was the verbal and judicial attacks, but I was well prepared to take care of those. Especially being so powerful in the education system, seeing as how I taught half the classes.

But when Sophomore year came around, things changed drastically, and suddenly...

I wasn't alone.