The money, drugs, and temptation - my life on the bad side

How it begins

Numb. Every part of me feels numb. I can hauntingly feel a hand on my shoulder and someone very close to me, but I cannot put together the two, and remain motionless.

No one. I have no one left. Well, there is Kiki, but what support does a baby offer me? Nothing but something else that i must care for and spend my bill money on.

Oh shit, the bills. 

Kiki is small, and irritating like a three-year old should be, but i love her. i love her like my own baby, which she ends up being treated like most of the time. What will happen if someone finds out that I am the one caring for her? They'll take her away from me, put us both in homes until we're given false parents for the next three years of my life. When I'm an adult, I'll try and go take her back, but they won't let me, i know they won't.

"Laura, you have to breathe!" I start to hear, cutting into my cloud of panic. "Come on, breathe!" the voice is unfamiliar, male and deep.

I keep my eyes closed, but very slowly i opened my mouth and shakily tried to start my lungs working. 

"Good girl. Good girl." A female voice coos, rubbing the inside of my wrist. I feel under my back a soft, smooth surface, warm against my cool arms. I must be in a bed, in the hospital after I passed out on the bench.

"She'll be fine now, boy, don't worry." the female voice reassures him, moving her hand from my wrist. A moment later there's a light poke in the back of my hand, and something starts juicing slowly into my veins.

"What are you doing to her?" the male voice asks, and as I regain consciousness I begin to recognize the deep tone.

"This is just to calm her when she focuses a little more. You don't have to worry, it'll drain right out of her, she'll be back to normal in no time." 

"Alright, thank you miss." Andrew. That's who's voice it is, the dark man I met not twenty minutes before... well, before everything crashed down like Haiti. But i suppose that started a few years back, didn't it?

When I was eleven, a few months after my father was gone from my life, stolen from my life by some universally Laura-hating soul, my mother took up the drink. I had so little idea as to what was going on, only knew that I was now alone, better to be without a mother than have one that would scream at me and pass out every day, leaving me to care for myself.

One day she came back, and i wasn't sure why i never noticed it before, but i could see she was very pregnant. When i asked her where the baby came from, because daddy wasn't here, she smiled and told me the dark side. With the babe, she also brought the biggest bottle of drink i had seen in the house in a long time, and a handful of money, a whole ten dollars of which she gave to me. I still have it.

I didn't know until many years later how my Kiki was conceived, that mother was so desperate she gave herself to some unknown man for just a little money, and ended up with another mouth to feed. Sometimes i think that's why mother didn't pay enough attention to Kiki - because she simply reminded her about how she came to be, the desperation which she succumbed to, which ate her again and again and again.

One night, after she had finished her last half bottle of whiskey, she started screaming at me to find her more. I tried to explain that I was only fourteen, and i couldn't get any for her. I was sobbing, and she was yelling, and newborn-Kiki was crying, until i finally just grabbed my baby sister and mother's purse and ran from the house, wrapping her tiny frame in a throw blanket off the couch. I was freezing as i ran through the autumn night until i reached the strip mall which makes our town slightly more bearable. The liquor store was closed, for on Sunday nights it's policy is "Get sober and see you tomorrow after work", so i picked up a rock from the sidewalk, and told Kiki not to look and i turned her around... And threw the rock through the front window.

The alarm started screaming at me, and i was crying and Kiki was bawling, but i hadn't been thinking, and i just knew i couldn't have left her with mother, so i slide her under my shirt, wrapped the blanket around my fist and punched out a hole big enough for me to fit through.

Well, obviously I didn't get away with it. By the time i found a bottle of whiskey in the huge stores and too many isles, the police were already there, adding their sirens to the mess of sounds going through my ears. They took me out in handcuffs, and took Kiki from me laughing like it was some joke. 

They were LAUGHING at my pain, at my desperate need.

I ended up serving six months in a juvenile rehabilitation hall with idiots who actually needed help.

I just needed my father back.

Ever since then, all attempts at getting a job to help pay for bills, for drink, for a life, have been completely fruitless. No one in town is so desperate that they want to hire a girl whom obviously has mental problems and has already tried once to steal, and shattered a window, plus has no resume because she cannot get a job, because of all the above.

It's the vicious circle of crime, of lose, of no parenting and abuse.

 And so, when i finally open my eyes to see Andrew's concerned face, someone worrying about me like a friend, like Michel, who isn't here, and he asks me how I'm doing, I smile. When he tells me that it's the next day, and I was unconscious for about twelve hours, i nod. When he says that Michel called and he had to go out of town unexpectedly to visit his grandmother, who's now very sick, I'm ok.

When he invites me over for the night, i agree. 

**Authors note**

So, if you've gotten this far into the story, then i assume it's good enough for you to keep going at. This is one of the many books I am writing at the time, but i hope to keep uploading to it. the good stuff started next chapter, so keep reading, and watch for new uploads!