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It's a shame that Mom is so hung over all the time.

With her absence from not only my life, but Louie's life as well, I am the only person available to fill the gap. For most of my childhood, my home was the temporary nest of no-good, fleeting, and selfish men who had my mother wrapped around their little finger. But she was there.

Louie does not remember much of this time, as she was only a toddler, but I remember well. It wasn't until I was in the eighth grade that Mom had actually settled down with a man, no better than the rest, but one that kept up the charade of love for many years after they met. He was a rich and attractive man, owning franchises of different middle-class organizations, earning him a very influential spot in society.

Mom had no job. It was only Joseph's wealth that kept our family sustained for the few years that it did. I gave him no chance, and I waved him off like the rest of the men that had come and gone out of our family's life. He was insistent on having a good standing with me, as I was showered with meaningless gifts and affections. I tried not to hate him, so simply remained on level ground.

He was always touching me. Some gestures were very surreptitious, such as the lingering brush of a hand against my arm, or the thumb making circles on my kneecap under the dinner table. Other things he did were much more noticeable, but no one seemed to mind except for me. He would walk next to me on the way to the car, slipping his rough hand under the hem of my shirt, caressing my exposed back. When he went to the lengths of kissing my sister and me goodnight, the kiss always felt a moment too long, and wrong against my lips.

I didn't say anything, because I didn't quite understand how I was supposed to react. Although a teenager, I had never had that much affection shown to me, especially from a male. All I had to assume was that it was normal. Clearly, it was not. I found this to be true one night, when my mother and Louie had gone to her open house for school. On that night, Joseph raped me.

There was and has never been another way to explain it. There are no details to recall, and no need for further explanation. It's what I told my mother. It's what I told the police. It's what I told everyone, and what I still tell them today. And after that, they stop asking. There were no questions to ask, and there had never been anyone who truly cared, or maybe just was daring enough to step over my implied boundary on the subject. That was until two years after the incident, when I met someone who apparently did.

My mother, my sister and I moved away from our home and everything I'd known since I was a small child. We changed not only addresses, but states as well. My mother was in a deep pain, and all she wanted to do was to escape. With the money that was had left over, she found the means to homeschool Louie and me for a while. The time in which I was homeschooled could be compared to the intermission of a play. Observed at the middle-most important part of the storyline, the turning point, it leaves the audience wondering whether the ending will be of joy or of tragedy.

We were under my mother's full care, or rather, she was under ours, from the beginning of my eighth grade year to the end of my sophomore year. As I began the eleventh, and Louie the sixth grade, our mother had become too unstable to teach us anymore. She had only piled more stress onto herself in beliefs that it would help absorb the rest of it that she already had. It didn't work, as I had suspected the whole time, because within a year, she had become a fully-fledged alcoholic. She drank, smoked, and lay in the ashes for days on end. There wasn't anything I could do to help. So every morning, I helped to get Louie ready for school and averted her eyes from the mass of broken life thrown over our couch that was once our anchor in the world.

And so the cycle continued. For my remaining years of school, I stayed low, making a few friends here and there. I didn't know why I made the ones I did. I never spoke because I didn't believe in wasting oxygen when you didn't have anything important to say. Nothing about me was important, so I had no reason to say anything to anyone. My lightly freckled face was never confronted with the influence of makeup. The only cosmetics I ever used were those for the eyes, because I was a strong supporter of the idea that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I thought that maybe if people could see my soul, they'd have no questions to ask of me. My emotions lived in my eyes, and only there.