Prologue

Prologue. That's basically it.

Let's just say, there's three of them. They are all quite talented and independent. However, they rely on each other to survive. Abigayle is seventeen and the oldest. She has a steady job, and a driver's license. Her long, strawberry blonde hair cascades down her back, just barely brushing her hip bone. Contacts mask her smoky blue eyes, giving them the appearance of a hazel color. She only wears them when she's driving. Abigayle has an average build and average height.

 

The second oldest, Emalie, is fifteen. She has her driver's permit, and a working permit. She works at a local pizza store, and gets to take home orders that aren't picked up. That is very handy for her. Emalie's brown hair reaches her mid back, and isn't too think or too thick. She loves to play around with her hair every day, and to make different styles with it. She has really green eyes, and a perfect complexion, with few freckles. Emalie is skinny, and is about five-three, but has a very large personality for her size.

 

Maddie is the youngest of the three. She's only thirteen, and she is also small for her age, like Emalie. Her red hair brushes past her shoulders, only by inches. She doesn't have a permit for a job or a license, and is often left home alone while Emalie and Abigayle are working. Maddie is very smart, and often does Emalie's and Abigayle's homework, in order to give them more hours at work.

 

The glasses she wears, she's had for about three or four years, but they still work. They're only for reading anyway, and she doesn't mind them. Like Emalie and Abigayle, she doesn't need braces. Even if she did, she'd never end up getting them, they don't have the money to buy them.

 

They live alone, with no parents. The reason why, is very, very complicated. When Abigayle was sixteen, both of her parents were lost in an accident. She was in the car too, but she ran away. By then, she already had her license and a working permit, so she decided not to deal with foster homes or orphanages. She just took her stuff and left.

 

She had been searched for, but never found. Just like she wanted. She figured she could live with her friend for a

while, when she eventually added on to the hundreds of dollars she had saved, she could move into a house of her own. After about six months, just a few before her seventeenth birthday, she moved into a house that cost about three hundred a month. She had enough saved up to pay for that house for about five months. She bought her car from some old man for only fifty dollars. For all she knew, it was a piece of crap, but she didn't care. It had low mileage and was good in gas. So she had a house and a car and was on her own. But not for long.

 

One day, while on job hunt, Abigayle passed a group of kids on the street. They were teenagers, about thirteen or so, but they were kids to her. They were entertaining to watch, so she stopped for a second to watch them. A few minutes later, one girl stormed away from the group in tears. Abigayle noticed she was kind of dirty, and had scraggly clothes on. She also looked like she had been starved, or at least hadn't eaten in a while. Not knowing what would happen, Abigayle ran after her. She introduced herself, and found out the girls name was Maddie. Maddie had been kicked out of her house by her drunken mother, and her abusive step-father. She had been out of the house for about a month now, and had basically been living under bridges or benches, migrating from a town about six or seven miles away.

The only food she got was the leftover food that stores offered her at the end of the day, when nobody had bought them. One time, a couple of weeks ago, or as she told Abigayle, she found a five dollar bill on the streets, and bought a box of cheap cereal, a jug of milk and a few pieces of fruit. With the leftovers, she managed to make it to where she was. Abigayle felt terrible for the poor girl, and offered her a spot on her couch. She figured that if they went to a few yard sales, they could get her some clothes, and she could possibly get a babysitting job to help pay for food and stuff. That worked, and the two of them were living in Abigayle's house. After about two weeks, Maddie had a babysitting job that paid five dollars an hour, was enrolled in school, and she had a somewhat normal life.

 

Emalie came in a month after Maddie moved in. She didn't like to talk about what had happened, or why she had no parents. She was taken in and still, didn't want to talk about it. She seemed to have problems, but didn't talk about anything to anyone. Maddie met Emalie one day when she was walking home from her babysitting job. She found a payphone, called Abigayle, and next thing you know, there were three living in the one house. Emalie soon found a job at a pizza place and kept it. Not only was she getting decent pay, but she got food to bring home occasionally. A lot of her clothes came from the Goodwill, or Salvation Army, like Maddie and Abigayle's. By Abigayle's seventeenth birthday, the three were so close that you would think that they were sisters and living with parents. Technically, they were sisters, and none of them had parents.

 

Five months later, the three of them are still in the same, stable position. The food is coming home once a week from Emalie, and it normally lasts for two days. They all bring in school lunches, even if they did qualify for food stamps or free lunch, they didn't want to bother. Receiving any of those things meant that you need an adult who is your parent, which wasn't possible for the girls. They had no parents, and couldn't fake it either. Report cards, for the younger two were signed by Abigayle, and hers were just forged with her parents names. Phone calls were scary, because teachers knew Abigayle's voice. But they almost made it through this school year. It was May, and they got out in June. Unless they had to go to summer school, which wouldn't happen.