Chapter 1

Everyone has their own story.  Some people live day to day in a world that has become envious to those who don't live in such privileged conditions. Some of us live in a fairytale, while others, a nightmare turned reality, but even the greatest of fairy tales have their villains and battles. I'm here to tell you of my nightmare turned reality and how I'm still fighting to make it a fairytale.

My name is Alexandra. It's been a constant struggle since I can remember, probably further into the past than that considering all the things my family has told me. I've survived all this time by doing what is necessary. I've run, I've fought, I've bowed down, I've faltered, but there is one thing that I haven't done, given up. That has always been my means of survival and it's gotten me this far, so why stop now. I'm going to start from the beginning, at least from what I can remember.

I was born on March 6, 1991 at 6:03 a.m. to my mother, Evelyn, and my father, whom I would like to refer to as “The narcissistic, two-timing pig”, but we'll just refer to him as Joseph. Weighing in at 5lbs 6 oz, I began my life as an innocent, just like everyone else in the world. I had no idea of the life that was laid out before me and that I was going to embark on a very rough journey, that unfortunately, some never return.

I don't remember much from my past. A few memories of birthdays, school bus rides, playing at the park, but what haunts me the most is the nonexistent memories of my mother and father. One memory, however, will stay with me for the rest of my life. This memory is the one that I believe that if it had never happened that my life would be entirely different, but until someone discovers time travel, I'm afraid my present is as is.

I was about 2 years old when the previously mentioned memory took place. I remember my father kissing another woman, who we will only mention once, so therefore her name is not important. My dad had an affair with her and that is when my family got torn apart as if it was nothing. I was just a child then, but the fact still remains that had this not happened, my family would still be intact and I would have something to be proud of since most parents are divorced nowadays anyway. Regardless of what people think, divorce does hurt the children regardless of their age. I'll tell you more about that later and how it still affects me to this day.

Fast forward a tiny bit, and my mother finds another man to take Joseph's place. His name was Douglas. Now, in the beginning, Doug, was a good, kind, loving, family man, but towards the end he showed his true colors. He had a temper as the name suggests, but no one knew just how bad. Evelyn bore two more children. One in 1994 and the other in 1997. The oldest, Brodi, and the youngest, Cole. Our mother spent more time with Brodi so that is why Cole is the way he is today.. He never had a fair chance to get to know her. We were all one big happy family, once again, until the universe decided that this little family wasn't worth keeping together because of a mistake that I made.  I placed hickies on my arms after being put down for a nap that I did not want to take and it just so happens that they came out looking like bruises. Douglas, I'm assuming saw this as an opportunity to seize his children and file for full custody, deeming Evelyn an unfit mother. Again, my mistake. I was a child after all. I managed to screw my life up with a simple thing at the age of 8. I didn't know any better and being badgered enough will make anyone cave. Coercion is a powerful thing.  So they parted ways after my mother spent years building a marriage with Doug who abused her and tore her down and made her feel small, and in the process, lost all three of her children.

After that, Douglas married a woman whose name was Agnes. Now Agnes was somewhat pretty on the outside (if you're into those types of women), but she had an ugly personality. She was exactly like the evil stepmother from Cinderella, and in this case, I was Cinderella. She had two daughters who will remain unnamed since they never really played much of a role in my life. Doug and Agnes ended up turning me against my mom. They told me what a horrible person she was and that she didn't love her children and if she did she had a funny way of showing it. I didn't want to believe it. How could a woman that loved me so much enough to risk her life during childbirth hate me? I'm her daughter?! I was absolutely dumbfounded, but given the circumstances, it sort of made sense at that time. I was successfully brainwashed. I blindly ended up turning against the woman who had given me life and made Agnes my new mom.

Now being that Douglas had moved on and found a new love, so did Evelyn. The man who she met was built, tall, and scary with a kind heart and lots of love to give to both of my brothers and I, as well as my mom. He was named Adam. They ended up getting married by what I'm assuming was a justice of the peace considering I wasn't invited. My mom had her kids by her side and a man that loved her deeply. She had found her fairytale ending, or so it seemed.

I honestly don't remember much after my mother lost us in the custody battle except lots of tears. I remember Doug dropping me and my brothers off to our mother and them taunting each other. I distinctly remember an occasion where Doug ran over my mother's foot and drove away laughing as if it was funny and a game he was playing to see who could hurt who more, mentally and physically. It was a terrible thing to watch. On another occasion I remember my mom bringing us back home to Douglas and Agnes and Cole asking Agnes where his mommy was. When Evelyn responded to him saying, “I'm right here, baby” Agnes corrected her by saying, “No, I'm his mommy”. The look on my mother's face was that off a woman who had just lost her child and rightfully so. Were they trying to brainwash my brothers too? They already had me in their clutches, so why not? That is a day I will not soon forget.

Years passed and we moved from a very small town to the middle of nowhere where I was about to attend a private school. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea, but I didn't have much of a choice. During my time there I made many friends. I met Cora, Zane, Corbin, Esther All of these people made attending school a little more enjoyable. Zane and Corbin harassed me to no end, but I believe it was harmless flirting. Esther was a hyperactive little girl who I ended up going away with one summer to her parents' camp. Now, Cora was quite possibly my very best friend while attending the private school. She enjoyed the same things I did and we made each other laugh. I honestly believe that some of the other students thought we were lesbian lovers or something, but whatever. She made life suck a little less. We drifted after I moved away and now we both are married and have children of our own and I'm happy for her.

During my time at the private school previously mentioned, I met a boy that I fell for immediately, Blake. He was tall, blond, skinny, funny, and smart. He hung out with Zane and Corbin a lot so I guess that's how we ended up meeting. His mom was an art teacher at the private school and anyone who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for art. It is my safe haven. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure of all the details, but somehow I ended up going to her for my problems and she eventually ended up sticking her neck out for me. Every time I had her class she would give me her cell phone and I would go into the bathroom and call my mom to talk to her. I don't remember how or why I wanted to be in contact with my mom, but it felt right. This woman was proving to me that she loved me and that's all that mattered. I was very grateful for this woman letting me use her phone to contact someone she didn't even know, but I didn't know that her actions would have consequences. In the end, it cost her her job, which I'm assuming was the work of Doug and Agnes. I remember feeling sad and very, very guilty. Was this all my fault? Had me wanting to talk to my mother cost this woman her living? Did they really want to keep me away from my mother that bad? Well naturally, being a rebellious adolescent, this only made me want my mom even more. I lashed out in ways I never thought possible. At one point I remember arguing with Douglas, who had just had his appendix removed, and he was so angry with me that he jumped up to spank, me or whatever he was intending to do, ripping open his stitches in the process.

Now the thing that I haven't told you about him is that he was very abusive towards me as a child. I was beaten, pushed down stairs, slapped, kicked, you name it. I ruled it out as him hating me because I reminded him so much of my mother that he saw fit to take it out on me. You might be saying “Well, you might be overreacting” or “Maybe that isn't the reason he did that”. Well, you weren't there and your thoughts might be true, but at the time, that's how I felt. He showed my brothers a lot more love than he did me. He showered them with gifts, rarely ever fussed at them, and I can't recall a single moment where he struck them as punishment for their actions. They were let off easy, whereas I was treated like the hideous outsider who didn't belong. My punishments in that family were a little uncalled for. As I have previously mentioned, I was treated like Cinderella. My punishment, for a reason I don't seem to remember, was to complete everything on a list that they had provided me with. Now if you've ever read the story of Cinderella, you can put two and two together and essentially guess what I had to do. Yep, that's right. Housework. The kind that involved cleaning floorboards and moldings with toothbrushes, dusting the entire three story house we resided in, cleaning the attic, painting walls, scrubbing dirt from the grout between tile; it was torturous. I couldn't stand the treatment much longer. I was a child then, and be that as it may that I had made mistakes and acted out, I always understood that it was a part of growing up and discovering who I was. 

Eventually, I think Agnes started to somewhat understand that I wasn't warming up to her, so it was pretty obvious that I needed a mother. She started allowing my mother to visit with me as long as she or Douglas was present. Supervised visitation? Really? This woman gave birth to me, she's not gonna kill me! Regardless, if a small matter of having someone be there when I saw my mother was all it took to get to know her, I accepted it. It was what I wanted after all. Upon one visitation, my mother and my grandmother, Ruth, came with Agnes and I shopping. During this time I saw an opportunity to steal my mother's phone that way I would be able to call my boyfriend at the time, Aiden, considering that I had my phone privileges revoked for some unknown reason. I took the phone when my mother was strung out on painkillers riding with us to the mall. It was simply too easy to get away with being that she was doped up and not paying attention.

The thing that you have to understand about my mother is that she was, in fact, a pill head. I didn't think much of it up until recently. You see when she was 17 years of age, she was involved in a tragic car accident that caused her to smash the left side of her head on the dashboard in the car. This has caused me to always remember to wear my seat belt when driving and riding in a vehicle. The accident happened as a result of an 18-wheeler. I'm not positive on all the details, all I needed to know was that she was severely injured in the accident, crushing the left side of her skull in, leaving shards of skull imbedded in her brain. She was rushed to the hospital and had an emergency surgery where they removed what they could of the pieces of bones that had lodged itself in her brain and ended up removing a portion of the left side of her brain and placing a metal plate in it's place.

Now as you can about imagine, I did get caught for stealing her phone. I remember Agnes searching through my room for it, but she never found it until one day when I was at school. I know, I know, I brought it upon myself, but come on, name one teenager who hasn't broken the rules at one point. I can't really remember the consequences, but I'm sure they weren't pretty. It wasn't the first time I had stolen a phone just to talk to Aiden, so I didn't really care about the punishment. I did, however, receive a cell phone for my sixteenth birthday. I remember my mother and Agnes taking me to Wal-Mart, asking me all these questions about cell phones. Questions like “What kind of phone would I get if I could get one?” or overhearing them talk about “how much I would talk on the phone/text?” It was kind of obvious, but I acted surprise when I received the phone nonetheless. I remember it was a Razr phone or however you spell it. It was all the craze at the time and I was fascinated with the gunmetal color, so I got that one. I don't remember what happened to it, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Living with Doug and Agnes was bearable, as long as I kept my distance, but not entirely. Sometimes I would break out in random fits of crunches and push-ups as a way to deal with stress or boredom. Other times I would just sit in bed and do nothing and no one seemed to notice that I was depressed and down all the time. I hid myself away from everyone in my room, but I guess that is normal teenage behavior. The only times that I can remember being happy was when I was able to sneak away and go exploring in the field on the other side of the fence by the house, although, I did walk around on a day to day basis with the same exact thought: “How do I get out of here?”. I was such an outcast. No one seemed to like me and no one wanted to be around me. I was treated like everything that I did was bad or not good enough and I always got the worst of the punishment. I remember one time where one of my stepsisters and I were sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window and Douglas walked in and caught us, but I was the only one that got pulled back in through the window by my hair. What made me deserve that, but not her?

It was like he got some type of enjoyment out of watching me suffer. Like I had mentioned, I was abused, and it was bad. It has caused me to be gentle in my words and actions towards my daughter knowing that at her age, a raised voice or a raised hand is terrifying. I know, I've been there. I'm not saying that I don't spank her, but I watch how hard and I try my hardest not to get carried away. I don't want her to go through what I did. 

I know that they saw me walking around most days with a look of unhappiness. No one even lifted a finger. It was like they didn't care at all. Why would a man that loved my mom and I enough to marry her and adopt me, treat me so bad? Had I done something wrong? Did he really see that much of my mother in me and have that much resentment towards her that he had to take it out on me? I hated it there. I secluded myself and began to inflict pain on myself whenever I was feeling unwanted, angry, sad, lonely, etc. which you can about imagine was almost all the time. Pain became my tears, pain became my anger, pain became my release. I cut myself so bad sometimes that I ended up having to wear long sleeve shirts just to hide them, even in the heat of summer. I remember punching myself in the face as a way to deal with all the hurt and emotions that Agnes and Doug were throwing at me after a discussion had come up about me losing my virginity. I'll tell you that story now.

They sat me down at the table one day and asked me if I had ever had sex. I sat there looking dumbfounded as to how they had found out. Agnes said, “We know you have We got a phone call from school from one of your teacher. You must have been bragging about it, huh?” I was confused. I hadn't told anyone at school about it so how could a teacher have called and said that?

“No, I never said that.”

“So the teacher was lying?”

“Yes, they were. I never said that!”

“So did you have sex or not?”

“. . .yes. . .”

Douglas places his hands on the table, leans in close to me, looks me in the eyes and says. . . 

“You're a s**t!”

I had no idea what to say. I was heartbroken. I had nothing else to do but stand up and run to my room crying. Once I got to my room I remember throwing things around and breaking s**t. I was livid! Who had betrayed me and told them that I did that? Then it hit me: MY MOM!

Let's rewind a little bit. I'm not like most girls, at least I like to think that I still have some morals. I lost my virginity to Aiden at 16 years old, on the levee in [insert town name], when it was 30-something degrees outside. That's the extent of my memory when it comes to losing my v-card. I don't remember the date, time, day of the week, or any of that other bullshit. It was cold and very unromantic. 

He came meet me on the top of the levee with a screwdriver. Right off the bat, it was weird, but it only got weirder. He told me that his friends had sent him to kill me with the screwdriver. I was like 'what?!', but I thought he was just playing so I didn't run. He had a history of being goofy and weird so I was pretty calm. We talked for a little while and then he threw the screwdriver across the levee. After that, we sat down on the grass and talked some more until we started making out and things started heating up.

Now I say that I lost my virginity that not, but then again I'm not entirely sure. He was on top of me for a little while, but all I remember was pain and a lot of 'trying to figure things out'. At one point he said he had to pee and got up and went pee in 30-something degree weather. Like I said, it was totally unromantic and weird, but the one thing that I was always grateful for was that he had protection with him. I will always have respect for any man that carries around condoms, whether it be to protect himself, his partner, or both.

Well not to long after that, he left and went home and I went back inside and went to bed. The next day, I went visit my mom because it was her weekend to have me. One night she was sitting down at her computer in her spinny-rolly chair and I was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind her.

“Mom, I have to tell you something. Can I trust you?”

She spins her chair around to look at me and says, “Sure, baby. What's up?”

“. . .I lost my virginity to Aiden last night. . .”

I remember the look on her face. It was one of concern and disappointment, but that's all I remember.

Now, back to me wreaking havoc on my room. . .

  My room was a disaster. I sat down on the floor and looked at a compact mirror that had fallen on the floor in the middle of my freak out. I picked it up and opened it to see that the mirror had been broken in the process of it hitting the floor. I picked up a piece that had the sharpest edge and I placed it to my wrist and I cut myself for the first time. I had never done this before, but it seemed to come naturally. It felt good. The pain was the only thing I could feel at the time of cutting so I made a few more. It wasn't enough. I was still thinking about the fact that I had been betrayed and called a name that I never thought I would hear. Without thinking, I made a fist and punched myself as hard as I could in the face. One time, two times, three times. On the fourth one, I guess I didn't realize my own strength and I knocked myself out. I don't know how long I was out for, but I guessed it couldn't have been for long because I was still on the floor, although I'm pretty sure that no one would have cared enough to put me in bed anyway, but whatever. I looked at my lip and boy was it swollen and bruised. How the hell am I going to hide this when I go to school tomorrow? Makeup! It does wonders! I went to bed that night with a killer headache and tears in my eyes. Was I really a s**t or did he just say that to make me react? I guess I'll never know. What was I going to tell people when they saw my lip? At that moment, it dawned on me, I didn't care. I was hoping someone would notice and ask me what happened just so I could blame one of them and possibly have a scapegoat.

Well. . .

(If you haven't noticed by now, there are a lot of things that I don't remember and a lot of my memories in this are not in chronological order. I've deduced that after a traumatic event, people suppress their memories.  For me it feels like, I blacked out for a few months, came too and blacked out again, over and over, a constant cycle. So, sorry for being all over the place.)