Cheers

Part One

When I was no less than sixteen years old, I met a bouncing little girl called Raven.

Actually, that's not right. When I met her, she never bounced. Frankly, she was quite depressed. She became the bouncing girl I knew a few months after I met her when I became her therapist, in the sense that I was the only listening ear within her reach.

She was nine that day. The day we met. It was the day school got out for summer, and I had just finished tenth grade. Raven wasn't your average little girl. I knew that from day one. See, she was paraplegic. From the day she turned eight - exactly one year before I met her, she spent her days navigating in a wheelchair. But that's not the only way she was unordinary. She never played dress-up, or house or dolls, or anything a normal kid would be playing with. Even before she became immobile.

Instead, she studied. She only found joy in her endless collection of textbooks and online articles. When she wasn't studying, however, we played a game where she would spew hate and anger, and I would make it better by being there and telling her lies about how it would all be okay. We both knew they were lies, but somehow it was comforting to hear the right words. It eventually boiled down to her coming to me and saying "I need a therapist", and me immediately knowing what she meant.

It was a car accident. Her paraplegia. The day she turned eight, Meghan was driving her to her father's house in Colorado for the summer. It was a twenty-hour drive, so it was always broken into a three-day road trip, or a "family bonding trip". Kind of ironic if you ask me, considering just how broken their family was.

Anyway, Meghan was driving later than they normally did, and it was dark. They were almost at the motel when a drunk driver hit them head-on and flipped their car. Raven was trapped from the waist down and Meghan was knocked out. They both ended up in the hospital, and while Meghan got out with nothing more than a scar just below her left eye and a mild concussion, Raven had to pay a greater price - she'd never walk again. So be it. She adopted her wheelchair just like everything else in her life; indifferently, and with a blank face. She was out of the hospital in two weeks and off to Alex's house, where she spent the rest of the summer.

Meghan and Alex were divorced when Raven was five, and since Alex moved two states away as soon as he had the freedom to do so, it was decided that Raven was to spend the school year with her mother, and summers with her father. So every summer, Meghan and Raven would take a family bonding trip from Long Beach, California to Castle Rock, Colorado, and every fall semester, Raven and Alex would take a family bonding trip back from Castle Rock to Long Beach. Both of her parents desperately tried to cover up the fact that their family was broken beyond repair. They each tried to do things with their daughter, whatever they thought a kid might like. They even tried dating other people to try and replace the missing face, but nobody stayed, and Raven saw through them because in actuality, neither of them truly cared. They both had better things to do than deal with the aftermath of a failed marriage. It sounds harsh, right? But that's the reality. That's all Raven ever was to them, and they were terrible at hiding it. Eventually, they just gave up, which I think was for the better.

Meghan was the kind of person that you didn't want to cross on bad terms; she didn't mess around. She was a small known politician with all kinds of connections. She always had her black hair in a slick and tight bun, and she lived in a pencil skirt. Everyone working with her or for her was scared of her, and she had ways of getting information she wanted. I'm also pretty sure that she's the first person to live without a conscience, if she's alive at all. She did anything she believed would benefit her, with no regard to the effects it'd have on anyone else, including her daughter. Not a second thought.

Alex didn't have friends, or family, metaphorically speaking. I guess I could also put it in the way that he didn't have friendships with his family. I don't know much about him, but I know enough. He was an alcoholic, but not a violent one. Whenever he got drunk he'd ramble on about the sorrows in his life and fall asleep, rinse and repeat. I don't know where he worked, but he had pretty steady hours so I assume it was some boring day job that didn't require him to dress neatly. He always had messy hair and lived in greasy white tank-tops that didn't compliment his beer belly.

As I mentioned, relationships with his family were a lost cause, so he tried to scavenge whatever he could from Raven. This was hopeless because she lost any hope she may have had for him the first day she was old enough to understand that this man was indeed - hopeless. There was a lot of hopelessness in her family, but she learned to deal with it. She treated her loneliness as her friend, which I think, ironically, helped with her loneliness. It's funny if you think about it.

Raven was very smart for her age. She was forced to grow up very fast, by the rule of the court, but she was no slouch. Because of this, people often missed the fact that she was still a kid. She acted very maturely because she had no choice, but regardless of what the court decided, or how negligent her parents were, she still wanted to be a girl sometimes. But she wasn't comfortable with being a kid in front of me until much later. no, first I had to prove myself worthy of a grown-up front, where I wasn't worthy of anything. Once she decided I was on her side, she loosened up a bit, and we really became friends. That's when she first came to me for a listening ear.

She talked to me about how lonely she was. Explaining every little detail about how her parents divorced five years prior, and how Meghan didn't care, about how Alex didn't care, about how the kids at school looked at her weird because of her broken family, and how they stopped looking at her altogether when she got the words "you'll never walk again" thrown in her face.

Even though she looked indifferent the first time she sat in that wheelchair, she later told me that it was the lowest she'd ever felt and things only went downhill for her from there. I even witnessed some of it myself. The day I met her, she had run away because she didn't want to spend the summer with her father, even though she knew she had to go back before it was time to go. It was raining, and I had just fought with my own parents. I ended up losing myself and I went and fractured my hand on the brick wall of our house, so I decided it'd be best if I left for a while, and took a walk throughout the whole city. I didn't have a destination or place I wanted to go, I just knew I didn't want to go home.

The word home is giving it more credit than it deserves. It was only home by definition, but I've never really been on board with the definition of a home. It's defined as "a place or destination where one lives permanently", but I never considered it a real home because I hated it. I don't think you should loath a home as much as I did. I think that the definition of home describes a house and nothing more. If anything, it was only the house that I happened to be raised in. My dad was always there because he can't keep a steady job, and he always found something to fight me over. He got a promotion when my mom got out of prison, but got fired soon after for inappropriate conduct. He wasn't exactly the faithful type.

I don't want to say I was verbally abused growing up because I never really cared, and I fought back so technically we're both guilty, but I'm pretty sure the justice system would classify it that way. Normally after a severe fight, I'd go for a walk to clear my head. By the time I came back, he'd almost always be passed out in the living room, and in all honesty, I'm surprised he never gave himself alcohol poisoning. Either way, we had just finished an alcohol and rage fueled fight.