The Good, the Bad, and the Crazy. //+//A Complicated Love Story//+//

Chapter 1: Mary.

My name is Mary. I am seventeen years old and everybody hates me. I don't say it for attention--in fact I don't say it at all, because, well, I don't say much of anything at all--I say it because it's simply, in the most raw and honest way of speaking, true. My mother must have hated me because she left. She was there one day and gone the next. I don't know where could have needed her more than I did but there must be some place out there. There must be some place that needed her arms, and her love, and her safety more than I did. That's what I tell myself at least, though I know the possibility that it was not a place that needed or wanted her more than I did but she who needed or wanted the place. The decision that my minds finally locked on to is the simple and believable notion that she hated me. What could a baby girl have done to be hated? You might ask, as did I at the time...but now I see. I was born. That was hateful enough. My father must have hated me because he abused me in every way. Mentally, physically, sexually. That went on from the time I was three to when I was ten years old. I never told my teachers or a police officer, or anyone. I don't know why I didn't. I suspect it was because I didn't really know I should or that what he was doing was abusive or wrong or anything but normal. I do remember being scared though. I would sit in my room every night praying that he wouldn’t come in. Eventually neighbors heard my screams, and usually here on the west side of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, we try to mind out own business, but they must have had enough of my hopeless howls; they alerted the police. They came and to my pleasure, and oddly my dismay, took him. I was happy for a while then. There were no more fears as I went to bed, and no more cruel words, though somehow I missed him. I didn't miss his personality or his actual presence, but I missed him in the same way I missed my mother, I suppose. I missed him without reason, the way I wished I could miss him; I missed the hope of a parent, not the actual person.

I spent a lovely time in the orphanage. Most of the kids there were sad but I was just happy to be around people and have relationships, though every time I seemed to find a good friend they'd get adopted. We'd always promised to stay in touch but being eleven year old girls it didn't happen. After half of a year in the orphanage I was finally given a foster mother. Well, I’m not really sure you can call her a mother. It was just Miss. Catch. Miss Catch was a lanky woman who'd spent too much time in the sun during her youth and was lightly, lightly being a kind word here, addicted to alcohol and smoking. She had brown hair and always wore too much red lipstick. Don't ask me how she was eligible for a foster child but somehow she pulled it off. She didn’t love me. She didn't want me. She wanted and loved the money that came from the government when she housed, clothed, and feed me. None of which she actually did. She let me live in her house but it wasn’t a home. She bought me two pairs of pants and three shirts. I didn’t get new ones until the ones I had literally feel apart. She didn’t feed me. I feed myself with whatever I could find in the fridge. There was never much. When I was about twelve I started stealing from her purse and running to the BillyQuickMart down the street to get food. Sometimes I was so hungry it kept me awake at night. Miss. Catch must have hated me because she never cared enough to keep herself sober and I know she hated…because she told me so, every day. Her words were slurred and I'd never done anything to her but the words were still there. It doesn't matter how liquefied they were by beer they still stung like knives in my chest.

There were the slight occasions where we'd run out of money and she be forced into being sober and then she'd apologize and swear she was going to be get better. It lasted for a month once. That's the longest we've ever gotten. I don't tell anyone because I'm afraid what'll happen if I do. I'm almost eighteen. Would I be put out on the streets?

Then of course there was school. The kids at school don’t tell me that they hate me, but if looks could kill, I’d be dead. In class I have an ocean of empty seats around me. I sit by myself at lunch. I have no friends, not a single one. I cant even pretend that there was one other shy girl who sometime joked with me in class or ate lunch with me on occasion because it would be an utter lie, due to the fact that no such thing ever happened. I don't have any friends, simple as that. Never have, never will. So now it's been established that the kids at my school sucked but I feel the need to stress that it’s not just them, like I was saying, everybody hates me. I don’t understand why, I haven’t given them any reason to. I was always good to Miss. Catch. I never gave my father any trouble. I don’t know what I did that was so terrible an entire school despises me. And my mother…I was only a baby. How can a baby offend you? How can you hate a baby? It was my existence that made her hate me. Maybe that’s what it was with everyone, I had no meaning in life, I was a waste of space…and they knew it. Maybe that’s why they all hated me.