Going Up - Now On Amazon

Chapter One

I hadn’t imagined that I’d still be clueless about where my life was headed when I graduated high school. I figured that as the years went on I’d figure it all out, somewhere along the way I’d just know what I was meant to do with my life.

It didn’t happen.

Growing up in a less than stellar home environment didn’t help me branch out either. My childhood was grim to say the least.

When I was barely 7 years old my mother died from a drug overdose. My father told me constantly that she was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic that he knew sooner or later that this was going to happen. I’d always found it interesting that he would say those things, because my only memories of my mother were happy ones. Playing with dolls and baking cookies together. However as an innocent child, I had no choice but to listen to the brainwashing words of the only adult I knew.

By the time I was 11 my father had began to tell me I was “Just like her”. For three years I listened to how crazy I was. How one day I would become a drug addled hooker, because that’s all women like me were good for. The venom my so called father spat out at me made me feel so utterly worthless that I just began to believe every single word he said.

My future seemed as grim as my life had been so far.

At the age 14 his loneliness and lack of companionship pushed him in to using me as a stand in whenever he got drunk. He decided it was pointless wasting money on the 'drug addled hookers' he claimed I would grow up to be like, when he could just have me.

For two long and horrifying years I feared and dreaded nightfall, I wondered if I would hear the creak of my bedroom door and the sickening smell of his beer filled breath. I lived a hell on earth in the one place I was supposed to be able to grow and flourish. Instead I felt only depression, a dark shadow over my entire soul. This was a place I was supposed to call home, instead I dreamed about escaping it one day, and finally being free. Then out of the blue, shortly after my 16 birthday it did not happen again. Not even once.

After that his touches became closed fists, that could fall again and again with force against my soft skin, sending me black and blue where no one could see. The smallest thing would send him in to a frenzied rage, and there wasn't a time that I wasn't injured somewhere because of him.

 My only reprieve from his torturous grapple on me was when he would drop me off at the school gate, I was only allowed to go because he was fearful of being caught by truancy officers or child services. To ensure my silence he would warn however; that if I ever breathed a word of his despicable crimes, he would kill me. I had no reason not to believe him, he had a psychological hold over me. His evil dark brown eyes would haunt me throughout the day and I would feel them on me constantly, watching my every move even though he was nowhere near me.

I did what I could to survive. I forced myself not to feel the anguish anymore, I closed the pain off and shoved it inside a little box. Because I couldn't let him win.

 As soon as I turned 18 a week before graduation I ran away. I had fear in my veins, threatening to hold me back, but no longer being a minor meant chasing me down would be difficult. I could be free. I didn't need any more encouragement than that. I wanted to live a normal life. Forget about everything he'd put me through.

He wouldn't control my life anymore, and he couldn't ruin me just because he'd tried to strip me of everything it means to be a person. I wouldn't let him. So with determination to live a normal life and forget all the pain, I’d caught the bus from my small home town Genoa Springs and headed to Los Angeles.