Prologue

I was nineteen years old before I really felt like I was in control of my own life. Before that, it was always someone else entirely. I was just a puppet on some strings, being tugged here and pushed there, walked all over and there was nothing I could do. That’s what I had grown up to believe.

Being the oldest of three sisters was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I wasn’t just their big sister; I was their best friend – their only friend. And they were mine. I basically raised them, mothered them and took care of them. I was a “mother” when I was three years old. Almost literally.

My mother – though I can never think of her as a mother – was a mature, college gradate with a bright future when she met Andrew Martin. No one ever suspected anything to happen the way it did. My mother was supposed to go to medical school; she was supposed to be a doctor. She would have been a doctor right now. At this very moment. But Andrew ruined her life. He controlled her every move. She was pregnant with me after they had only been dating for four months, and when she wouldn’t have an abortion, he threatened to kill her. But instead he beat her up pretty good and took off, though, he re-appeared just after I was born and everything was perfect again. I’ve been told that everything was fine for two years. Apparently Andrew was a good father and my mother was happy with him. But everything crashed to pieces when my mother found out she was pregnant again. This time, Andrew pretended to be happy. He took care of her while she was pregnant; he worked to support us and everything. We were going to be a real family. But he went crazy – apparently – just two weeks before my twin sisters were due to be born. He beat the shit out of my mother and left her – and my sisters – to die in our apartment, while he took off again. I was told that I went to the neighboring apartment and banged on the door – at three years old – and told the person who answered that my mommy was hurt. They called an ambulance, took her to the hospital and they delivered the twins. But my mother didn’t make it.

My mother’s mother was contacted, although I had never met her before. She and my grandfather had disowner my mother when she started dating Andrew – after telling her that he was a bad influence and that she should stay away from him. My mother didn’t listen, obviously. She hadn’t talked to her parents at all in the four years before she died. But our grandparents didn’t want us – or couldn’t take us in at that point in time – so we were sent to foster care. I was three-years-old and my sisters were just a month old. Our foster family named them, since there was no one else to name them and they didn’t even have names at a month old. They decided to stick with the D pattern with us and named them Dillon and Devin. We were “the Daxter sisters” for the next three years while in foster care. On my sisters’ third birthday, they found them a permanent home. The only problem was that the family only wanted them; they didn’t want their six-year-old big sister. Our grandmother was contacted once again and was told that we would be permanently separated unless she was willing to take us in. A week later I had a permanent home – with my sisters.

Grandma Jackie and Grandpa Pete lived in a large, expensive house in the rich part of the city. Grandpa Pete was retired and they had more than enough money for the rest of their lives. And all of a sudden they had three grandchildren living with them. My mother was an only child – neither Jackie nor Pete had ever expected grandchildren. But they had us. I was six years old and had never been to school. Suddenly I was in kindergarten at the richest school in the state of New York with four year olds as my classmates. I couldn’t print my name; I didn’t know any letters or numbers. They had to start from scratch. My sisters began kindergarten the next year and although we were three years apart, I ended up only one grade ahead of them. It was horrible.

I wish I could totally erase all memories of my childhood from my mind. I had it much worse than my sisters – at least they were the same age as their classmates. I was always two years older than the kids in my class. I was much taller and stuck out like a sore thumb. But I wasn’t smart enough for them to put me into the grade that I belonged in. That didn’t happen until junior high. I was thirteen and in the fifth grade with eleven year olds, when suddenly they bumped me up into the seventh grade. That just messed me up even more. When I began high school, I had no friends because everyone sort of knew my story – my childhood – and thought I was weird. Well, I was weird. So no one wanted to befriend me.

That was when I met Trent McDonald. He was seventeen, I was fifteen. He went to a different high school than me, he didn’t know anything about me or my childhood or my life. We barely knew each other when we started dating, but he made me feel important, all of a sudden. It was like he brought out a different person in me. I was more talkative, was beginning to do better in school and I actually wanted to wake up every morning. Things were looking up for me. My grandparents were so thrilled; they loved Trent and his impact on me. He practically became part of my family; a big brother to Dillon and Devin. They just loved him.

It was my seventeenth birthday, a year and a half later, when everything changed. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. Things were supposed to have been different for me. I wasn’t going to end up like my mother – a woman I had barely known. I wasn’t going to be as stupid as she had been. I was going to be better. Trent began to tell me what to wear and what not to wear. He told me not to wear make-up or tight shirts or make my hair look nice. He started telling me not to talk to people at school. So I totally shut myself up away from the world – except for him. He was my world. He had made everything better so I assumed that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. He couldn’t. But he wanted me all to himself. He told me not to hang out with my sisters. He told me not to listen to what my grandparents said. Eventually, just after our two-year anniversary, I moved out of my grandparents’ house altogether and into his bachelor apartment with him. I was eighteen, he was now twenty. Things only got worse. I wasn’t allowed to see anybody besides him. I went to school and came straight home – most of the time he wasn’t even there waiting for me. I spent all evening by myself, waiting, hoping that he would come home and be with me. But he often stayed out all night; to this day I don’t know where he had been. But now I don’t care. I graduated high school but had no one at my ceremony. My sisters were too angry with me to attend, my grandparents had wanted to go but I hadn’t given them any details about it, and Trent just didn’t care.

That summer was the first time – in almost three years – that I actually stood up to him. I started asking where he was spending all this time. I wanted to know who he was with and why I was all alone, all the time. I wanted him to know that I missed my sisters, my grandparents, even my old friends from school. I wanted to get a job, to make some money, to meet new people. But that resulted in the beatings. Every time I opened my mouth, he hit me. He’d punch me, strangle me, just basically trying to shut me up. But that made me want to ask even more. I can remember more than one occasion where I thought I was going to die. It got to the point where I just wanted to die. But it wasn’t the fact that he beat me that changed things. No, it was when I found out about the other girl – or should I say girls. Suddenly I had two or more different girls calling the apartment – my home – screaming at me and telling me to leave their boyfriend alone. They called me names and told me that Trent didn’t give a shit about me. They told me he loved them – all of them, apparently – and that I should stop trying to be with him. I used those conversations to make myself stronger. I told Trent that I never wanted to see him again. I packed up my things – which didn’t consist of much except for some clothes – and left. I stayed at the local homeless shelter for a few weeks before I got up enough courage to call my grandparents. That was six months before I turned nineteen.

I didn’t make myself any promises. Because I now knew that promises were made to be broken. Even ones that I made to myself. So I told myself that I would just deal with things as they happened. I figured that was the best way to go. I’ve never been more glad about anything in the world.