Xandra: This thing (can’t call it a story in script-form) is based off a true story. The names have been changed to protect the victims and people associated. Be kind, this IS a true story of someone I know dearly and their problematic childhood. This is written in the form of an online conversation between a girl and a friend, and very little has been changed from the actual conversation. Thank you, and enjoy.

Life With and After a Monster

By Xandra

Part One: Darrel

Alyssa: sigh Mind is turning to mush...too much thinking...

Karen: About what? o-o

Alyssa: Everything. I have stuff to write, things to do and I'm babysitting my evil brothers with my mother on my tail every night when she gets home.

Alyssa: STRESS! cries

Karen: pats

Karen: You got your threat of schoolwork, don't you?

Alyssa: They'll still scream and fight, no matter what

Alyssa: They're boys. Nothing I do shuts them up.

Alyssa: stressing

Karen: pats

Karen: You need a break.

Alyssa: I do!

Karen: That's what the summer holiday is all about.

Alyssa: No, it's all about my mother working and me babysitting. I'm so stressed I feel like my brain is going to implode...

Karen: Send them to friends'.

Alyssa: They have no friends, we just moved here a few months ago, only to move again. XX

Karen: Oh?

Karen: Where from/where to?

Alyssa: Washington State to Texas. (approximately 2,200 miles+ )

Karen: And then to where?

Alyssa: I just said. From Washington. To Texas.

Karen: Yeah, but you said 'to move again'.

Alyssa: About three blocks from the house we moved into because my mother and stepfather weren't "working out well".

Alyssa: He threw us out politely and now we live in an apartment.

Karen: rolls her eyes again

Alyssa: At least someone in my family agreed when I said I wanted his head skewered and stuck on my desk as a paperweight.

Karen: I agree with you.

Alyssa: Thanx. My mother didn't. She said "we agreed together and it's better we left"

Karen: Why did you move to Texas?

Alyssa: Long story

Karen: Meaning you don't want to tell?

Alyssa: No, it's literally a long story. We were broke, my stepfather had died and left all our money in the care of a Christian family living nextdoor to us, the father of which was hording it all for himself while we starved. Mom met a guy over the internet, talked to him, he came up, they got married, we moved to get away from the neighbors (who, might I add, tried to legally take my baby brother from us, the morons) and ta-da.

Karen: O-o

Karen: o-O

Karen: It IS a long story.

Alyssa: Told you. Stupid, huh?

Karen: No, simply angering.

Karen: Why did they try to take your brother away?

Alyssa: See, my ex-stepfather was his father but not mine or my kid brother's, and when he died everything was put in the baby's name (the "baby" is 7, FYI). If they got him, they would get the dead asshole's health insurance money that was meant for Danny (baby), so they tried to trick my mother into signing him over to them.

Alyssa: The idiots seemed to forget that she's a hell of a lot smarter than they thought. She caught them, but we didn't have the money to sue them, so we left.

Karen: How did they try doing that? O-o

Karen: Sorry if I'm nosy. ; I'm just interested. ;

Alyssa: I understand. Legal guardianship papers. The father of that family, Mr. Young, thought he was slick and carefully tried to tell her to come down and sign some papers concerning "the estate" or the money that ex-dad left us. She knows about this kind of crap and investigated. She busted them.

Karen: Isn't it kinda clear from what's written on the papers what she's signing on?

Alyssa: They wouldn't show them to her, he just called and said, "Hey, why don't you come down to my attorney's office so we can sign some papers for the estate, hmm?" He's always manipulating people that way, but she's smarter than he is by a longshot. She asked what was on the papers, he said "oh, nothing big, just come down," she asked why, he said "really, don't worry about it, just come down." She knew he was pulling something.

Karen: She could still go and check what it was about.

Karen: o-O

Karen: Still, those bastards . . .

Alyssa: She already discovered it. Guardianship papers. She forced him to have his lawyer fax them over.

Karen: Smart woman.

Alyssa: Indeed. She's good at that. Eventually, she pissed him off to the point that he got angry, which he does a lot (he hits his kids), and he said something like, "you don't NEED to think, you need to go sign the papers, I am thinking for you." That did it, he's lucky she didn't hurt him. The woman is a jujitsu champion.

Alyssa: I wish she would have hurt him. D

Karen: Yep.

Alyssa: She knew he'd try again because he had all the money (which was a lot) and a lawyer, and he could make up a lot of things that would get us taken by Child Protective Services. She wouldn't risk it, so we ran away, and now they have our house, the antique cars my ex-dad left to us and all of our money.

Karen:

Alyssa: Exactly. And it gets worse, too, but I won't bore you with it.

Karen: I'm not bored.

Alyssa: Okay then.

Karen: Unless you don't want to tell.

Alyssa: Not a problem, it's helping me vent. A friend of mine knows the neighbors daughters, girls that WERE my friends, and she reported to me that they've already sold my stepfather's antique white hearse and rented our house out.

Alyssa: They also sold his business, which is older than I am, and closed it down when it said in his Will that he wanted it to stay open to take care of Mom, me and the boys.

Karen:

Karen: How DID they get it all?

Alyssa: Okay, here it goes with the story of my stepfather Darrel. This one in itself is nice and long.

Karen: I like long stories. ;

Alyssa: You might not like this one. Darrel had diabetes, lung cancer, a bone disease and several mental issues on his own. A while ago, one of his enemies started stalking my mother, and that added to his mental problems drove her to take me and the boys, me at age ten, away from him, dragging us from Washington to Montana.

Karen: Ouchie.

Karen: Okay, I might not like it.

Karen: I still wanna hear it.

Alyssa: I warned you, remember that. We ran out of money and our neighbor, who was a drunk and abused his wife and daughters, started trying to call CPS on my mom for working two jobs to save us and having me babysit. After a year in Montana, we were on welfare and close to completely out of hope, when Mom contacted Darrel. He came and got us and brought us back to Washington--without Mom.

Karen: CPS?

Alyssa: Child Protective Services, the people that takes kids from "troubled homes".

Karen: Ahh.

Karen: Where was your mom?

Alyssa: Montana. Darrel left her there because we were just supposed to go visit him for the summer, but we ended up staying with him longer because we'd missed our friends in Washington. I was twelve and going to school, and I had a friend (who I still have to the day) that I liked to hang out with. I didn't want to go back to Montana, because we had money and a house there. I told her that. She accepted it.

Karen: Mm.

Karen: So your brothers stayed with you.

Alyssa: Yep. But staying in Washington with him...that was stupid of me to think. Soon after, Darrel started getting sick, and he'd always been an angry person. He shouted at me when he was stressed, he had me playing mother and adult to the boys. Weeks turned to years and pretty soon he told me he'd been diagnosed with cancer.

Alyssa: He and my mother had never really gotten along very well, and being a kid, he'd instilled it in my mind that she was insane, paranoid, and that we couldn't go back to her. We had to stay with him because she was "unsafe". So, I believed him. I held out through what they call "cancer rages", doing everything and failing most of my classes at school. It got to the point that I snapped.

Karen: hugs

Alyssa: sigh Thank you for listening so far, I'm sorry to stress you out this way.

Karen: It's okay.

Karen: I want to hear it, I told you. I'm not regretting.

Alyssa: smile Thank you, you're very helpful. This has been running around in my head for years.

Alyssa: Anyway, one night when he was shouting at me, I decided to shout back, and I did. He refused to listen to me, so I kept shouting, and it turned into an argument. He ended up practically throwing me out of a chair in front of my brothers, scaring the hell out of them, then telling me to "get the fuck out of his house." So, I did.

Karen: That bastard.

Karen:

Alyssa: My thoughts exactly. small smile

Karen: Great minds think alike.

Karen:

Alyssa: Anyway, back to my sad story, which gets better soon. I went to the neighbors to use their phone, but they gave me the "families should be together" speech and ignored the fact that this man had just and always HAD BEEN treated me like shit. They tried to get me to go home. I wouldn't. I wanted to see my best friend (Tara), who had been the only support I had thought this stupid shit. They said no. It went on like that until a friend of Darrel's showed up to get me out of there.

Karen: The Christian family?

Alyssa: That's the Christian family. nods The ones who stole our money. I'll get to that soon.

Alyssa: He had felt bad, I assume, and called her. His friend, Rachelle, came and grabbed some of my stuff, completely ignoring him, and came to get me from the Young's house. She later informed me that I was going back to Montana to be with my mother. Alone.

Karen: The nice bitch.

Karen: Rachelle, I mean

Alyssa: Nice indeed. Ha.

Alyssa: That news scared the holy hell out of me, and by the next day at 5 in the morning, after crying with Tara over the phone for hours, I was on an airplane on my way there. I was in for the shock of my life. As she took me from the airport in Montana, she told me I was going back soon--and she was coming with me. Two weeks later, we were in Washington again.

Karen: nods

Karen: But you didn't like her . . .

Alyssa: No, I like my mom okay (a hell of a lot more than HIM)--we had a talk and pieced out Darrel's stupid mind-games and found out that he'd pushed his own stupid beliefs, all of which were wrong, on me.

Karen: But when you met her, you didn't like her.

Alyssa: I was afraid of her, yes. I remembered a few times when she'd been angry and ignored all the good things about her thanks to Darrel.

Alyssa: She explained everything and I made up my mind that they were both sort of messed up socially, but she was the better of the two.

Karen: nods

Karen: Okay, go on.

Alyssa: All right.

Alyssa: I haven't explained about my mother. The woman is 120 pounds of skinny white woman that can benchpress up to 400 pounds. She took anger management and scared her shrink. She went to jujitsu classes and beat the shit out of the sensei, who had four blackbelts and was a very LARGE man.

Karen: Oh my.

Alyssa: Indeed, my thoughts exactly! She's superhuman, with an IQ of 168 points (above genius) and the ability to seem perfectly all right when she wants someone dead. That's how she handled Darrel.

Karen: Ahh.

Alyssa: See, my mother is part Native American, and as such she believes in animal spirits. She was classified as the wolf, because she's dangerous, and if you hurt her kids, she will KILL you. As you can see, the moment I filled her in on Darrel, she was NOT happy. So, when we went home, he behaved as if nothing bad had happened...but then, the moron lost his temper at me. In front of her.

Karen: . . . oh, my . . .

Alyssa: NOT the intelligent plan. Instead of KILLING him like she would have had she not gone to anger management, she yelled back at him for being stupid. I scrubbed a pot wrong or something. She verbally attacked him and he ran off with his tail between his knees.

Alyssa: A similar happening I can remember off the top of my head was when we went shopping. He didn't want to get his fat ass up out of the car, so he sent me in for something. I got the wrong thing. When we got home, he waited until she went outside to check the mail or something and started yelling at me for it. My kid brother, Aaron, ran out and got my mother. She came back. I was so glad. Her line was "Don't you EVER fucking shout at my daughter!"

Alyssa: He took off, needless to say.

Karen: Yep.

Alyssa: I ended up bawling in my room for an hour. She comforted me and told me he was stupid and I felt better, because I knew it was true. Unfortunately, it got worse from there. His bone disease kicked in to the point that, one night, I woke up to him shouting through the house while Mom was off at work. This part frightened me to no extent. Now fifteen, I awoke to find him literally unable to stand up off the toilet. His body was that deteriorated.

Karen: :\

Alyssa: I called my mother, who came home and ended up helping him up. I had spent five minutes watching this full-grown man cry. As soon as he was up and walking around again, he tried to say that he didn't need to go to a hospital. My mother told him, "Darrel, get your ass in the truck or I will carry you to it. Now." She won the fight. He went to the hospital.

Karen: nods and hugs

Alyssa: Right. Well anyway, he stayed there for a while until he could walk on his own--which was a long while. My mother scared the orderlies when she checked him in because he couldn't get out of her truck, so she carried him. Past them. Into the building. I stayed up all night, worried about it, and used that as an excuse not to go to school. Too bad it didn't work. Oh well. By the time he got out, he was using bottled air, his lungs were so weak from the cancer.

Karen: sighs

Alyssa: It didn't take long from there. He tried to keep working, but he was too sick to do so, so my mother had them transfer him from the hospital (after he was admitted for the second time) to a hospice, or a rest home. Once there, he couldn't leave, and he wasn't happy about that. We went to visit him once--and only once. The place smelled like death. It was so scary, and little Danny couldn't figure out "why Daddy was here". It was too much.

Karen: shudders

Alyssa: At one point, he did something insane. When passing between the hospital and the rest home for chemotherapy, he ditched the transport and disappeared. My mother was pissed. The rest home was scared. In all honestly, I was hoping he'd die out there or get lost. It was that bad. But he came back...about 9 hours later.

Karen: That bastard . . .

Karen:

Alyssa: His friend, Chris, said that he'd lied to him and told him it was okay for him to be out. He said they'd gone out to lunch. Soon after, Darrel was released home, because his Will said that if he were to become unable to work, he wanted to die at home. My mother did NOT agree with this. She told me, "I can see Danny walking down into his room to find him dead." That was it. I couldn't stand it, it was driving me nuts, and the thought that we had a living corpse downstairs in our house was so scary.

Karen: I know.

Karen: My family was kinda in your situation.

Alyssa: Really?

Karen: My grandmother died at her home, with my grandfather with her. My mother went to there everyday . . .

Alyssa: Wow...

Karen: I didn't know that she was dying the last time I saw her, though. I was spared.

Alyssa: You're lucky. Even Aaron wanted him to die. It was frightening to have a nine-year-old look me in the eye and say, "Sissy, is he dead yet? When is he going to go away?"

Karen: I learned that fact a week before she died and fexed her a letter I wrote to her three months earlier when she started to get sick. She died that morning, about 5 hours after I faxed it.

Karen: I know it is. . .

Karen: I would've been terrified if it happened here.

Alyssa: Wow

Alyssa: Want me to stop?

Karen: Nope.

Karen: I told you I wanted to hear it.

Karen: baps

Alyssa: Eep. Okay, continuing...

Alyssa: It got to the point that the fact that he was living was annoying. I wanted him to die. He's spent so much of my life making me miserable, and still he was. He had to walk around with an old-person's metal walker, with an air-cord in his nose. We could track him through the house just following the damn plastic cord on the floor. He even had a nurse that came weekly to change his bedpan and ask questions.

Alyssa: It was sickening.

Karen: Mmm.

Karen: nods

Alyssa: At one point, we had a blackout in the middle of the night, and I didn't even know it had happened, but it had turned off his air machine. It had taken my mother a half hour to find the emergency air-tank, but by then it was almost too late. We assume the loss of air damaged his brain.

Karen: nods

Alyssa: From there, he went downhill. He got sicker and sicker, and he stopped walking out of his room...but one night, out of no where, this man with lung cancer SCREAMED at the top of his lungs in pain. It terrified me and the boys. My mother called the paramedics while I took my brothers into my room to watch a movie and play on the bed, to keep them occupied. Turned out he had blood clots in his legs from not moving. They took him to the hospital.

Karen: Thank goodness . . .

Alyssa: nods A week before, Mom had told me that she saw a floating red spot in his eye, and being the intelligent person she is, she recognized it as an aftersign of a stroke. Needless to say, it wasn't looking good for him. A day later, I was informed that he couldn't breathe on his own anymore, and that he had a machine to do it for him. Then, they read his Will, and it said to unplug him if it got to that.

Karen: nods

Alyssa: They did. My mother went to the hospital and held his hand to look supportive, but she actually told me that it was to make sure he was dead. She sat there and held his hand until it went cold. shudders Then, she called me and told me. I actually cried, but it was more out of sadness that a life had been wasted that way. I guess.

Karen: It's one thing to wish someone to die and another to actually have him dead . . .

Alyssa: I know, but the scariest part came after that. I told Aaron, who ran up next to me when the phone rang. He looked up at me, and, this nine-year-old, blue-eyed, blonde-haired boy looked me right in the eye, SMILED and said, "It's over." Then he went off to play video games.

Karen: blinks

Karen: Wha?

Karen: WHA?!

Karen: HE SMILED?!

Karen: He didn't even have the decency to--!!

Karen: Ah well.

Karen: No more stress about that . . .

Alyssa: nods This boy had spent my time in Montana doing my chores and getting yelled at in my place. Imagine that, being nine and facing a maniac like Darrel.

Alyssa: It scared me, but I think it was justified.

Karen: Yes.

Alyssa: The man was a nightmare, and having him dead was a relief, sick as it sounds. However, that was just the beginning of the end for us. He died August 25th at 2pm, 2002, and a week later, we were told that the day he had escaped from the rest home, he had gone to a lawyer and changed his Will. His friend had lied to us. Paranoid and thinking Mom was against him for "locking him up" he signed all our assets over to the Youngs.

Alyssa: From there, the situation fell to where I started. They have our money and we can't get it back until we're each 25. If there is anything left then.

Alyssa: They were supposed to "take care of" everything until we each came of age and then give us what we were left, but instead they're spending the money and lying about it. These are supposed to be Christian people.

Karen: Eh.

Karen: Only 9 years to go . . .

Karen: What about Tara?

Alyssa: She's still in Washington. The idiot had told me that she was a bad influence and barred me from seeing her after we took Aaron to see Harry Potter and messed up the movie time. That was my fault.

Alyssa: The day he died I called her and she consoled me.

Alyssa: She was probably the only person besides the boys that saw how he treated me. I'm grateful for her.

Karen: Who told who that who was bad influence?

Alyssa: Darrel told me--or rather, yelled at me--that Tara was a bad influence and that she was making me do bad things for a screwed up movie time that was my fault. He was a moron before he was insane.

Karen: What kind of bad things?

Alyssa: We went to Harry Potter and I thought it was over at 2pm. It was over at 3. That was my fault, and he blamed her despite the fact that she hated Harry Potter and hadn't wanted to go.

Karen: . . .

Karen:

Alyssa: One other time, we had gone for a walk with Danny to the store and lied about it because he was nuts. He'd busted us and blamed her. Hell, I was the one that WROTE the lie she told him.

Alyssa: Before that, she had spent the night and we'd gone out to the store to buy snacks, and I had left Danny with Darrel. The asshole had turned his back and the kid had run off to find us. He got snatched up by CPS and Darrel blamed us.

Karen: . . .

Alyssa: We scrubbed our whole damn house until it sparkled, then I lied to a CPS agent to get Danny back. He still blamed us when I left him with Darrel.

Karen: Will you let me hate the fucker?

Alyssa: Indeed, go right ahead. I sure do

Karen: I hate him.

Alyssa: Is it sick that I'm glad he's dead?

Karen: Nope.

Alyssa: Thanks, that's reassuring...I gtg, talk to you later. And thanks for listening.

Karen:

Karen: Yeah, and you continue this tomorrow, ya hear?

Alyssa: Sure, no problem. Later.

Karen: Bye!

Xandra: There it is. The whole story. The next part, if it’s wanted at all, will be Alyssa’s report to a teacher in Washington about the trip to Texas, taken straight from her. Thanx for reading, and review with your thoughts. Once again, this whole thing was true.