A/N: This doesn’t have a whole lot of grounding in reality, for those of you who might try to read the author by what he writes. And believe it or not, this one has a direction. I’m going somewhere! Read and review, mates.

            “I was barely a child when it had happened. I’d only been six years old, but I still remember it. More than that… I dream of it, even in the daytime. Some days I can’t even close my eyes without thinking about it.”

            “Don’t embellish your story, Vanessa. I want to know why you wake the other children at night.” Dr. Tetlyn sat back and sighed. “Don’t you understand, people have asked for you. They want to adopt you, but then they decide not to because you act strangely. All I’m trying to do is help, but I can’t do that unless you help me first.”

            Vanessa stared at the woman coldly, or at least as coldly as an eleven-year-old could. “You want to know why I’m strange? If you do then you’d better listen. Doctor, have you any idea what it’s like living in an orphanage?”

            The doctor sighed again. Vanessa was extremely articulate for a girl her age. “I’m sure it’s terrible. But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to ascertain why you make it so horrible for others, and whether or not you need to be moved into a children’s mental ward, which I think may be worse. Can you help me prove you don’t need that?”

            Vanessa visibly stiffened, and began shivering, and when she took a breath, she only repeated the words, “they can’t” over and over. Dr. Tetlyn finally broke down. She usually interrogated the children, but those with as much spunk and backbone as Vanessa usually didn’t crack into repetition so early. The doctor thought perhaps this little girl might indeed need the ward, but she had a job to do. She sat next to Vanessa and put an arm around her shoulders in a mechanical, practiced gesture. But Vanessa shrugged her arm away. “You can’t put me there!” she almost screamed it.

            “Alright! Calm down, we don’t have to send you there, but you only have to cooperate. Tell me what I need to know, and we may not have to send you there.” Though we’ll probably have to.

            “Okay…” The girl closed her eyes and sat still for a moment until her breaths became regular, then she opened them and stared blankly across the room. “I hear them now… I was in my room. I heard them shouting from downstairs.”

            “I was just getting ready for bed, and I’d finished changing into my PJ’s. I remember I heard the first yell when I was just about to go brush my teeth. I believe my mother yelled first, not my father. Actually, I’m not certain I heard him yell at all. I crawled to the edge of the steps and listened closely, but I can’t remember now exactly what they were saying. All I remember is that my father kept speaking in an icy tone of voice that I could barely hear, but it sent chills up my spine. My mother kept yelling something about how he had to respect her… but it didn’t make much sense to me.

            “I can hear their voices yelling, but I don’t know what they were saying. But it must have been something important, because mother never yelled very much. Father’s tone, on the other hand, was nothing new. He wasn’t home much, he was a salesman, so he spent most of his time away from home, at the office or traveling. When he was, he frequently used that icy tone on me and my mother. A few times he’d tried to spank me, but mother said he wasn’t allowed to do that. This time though, they were really angry. Finally, mother yelled something and stormed out of the room, to the far end of the house.

            “Father was even angrier now that mother had run away from the argument. I heard him walking towards the stair and I scrambled to get up, but it was too late and I wasn’t off the stairwell before he saw me. He was fuming. ‘I thought I sent you to bed!’ he yelled. I was afraid, so I tried to run up the stairs and away from him, but he caught me and pulled me in close, and I could smell something on his breath… I guess it was probably alcohol, but I don’t remember the smell. ‘I’m going to make up for all those times your mother stopped me,’ he said.

            “He hit me. Nobody had ever hit me before. But it wasn’t just once, it was over and over again, and it hurt. I started screaming and crying but he wouldn’t stop… he hit my face, and my back and then my side, which knocked me down, but he still didn’t stop. He kicked me in the back and I slid down the hallway a little bit, and the only thing I could do was curl up into a ball and scream while he continued to shout, ‘Shut up!’

            “My mother saved me… She raced up the stairs while I was screaming and shouted at him again, but he merely smacked her aside and continued what he was doing. So she grabbed him and pulled him away from me. He started hitting her instead, and I screamed harder. Finally she fell, and he turned to shut me up again, but my mother grabbed his legs, and he tripped.

            “He fell down the stairs. He hit his head on the steps, and he didn’t get up that night. My mother started crying and came to me, and tried to comfort me, but I kicked at her and slid myself away. It hurt! I couldn’t let her touch me, it hurt so much!”

Vanessa was on the brink of crying. Dr. Tetlyn decided that was enough. “That’s okay, Vanessa. That’ll do. Why don’t you stay here tonight upstairs, rather than at the orphanage. I’ll call them and tell them you’re staying over.” Vanessa nodded quietly, biting back tears. Dr. Tetlyn guided her out of the room and handed her over to one of her associates, who would lead her to a room. Then the doctor returned to her office, slumped down on her chair, and sighed a third time. This girl will be the end of me, she thought, and she picked up the phone.