Kathy Ch.1 The Beginning

Chapter 1: The Beginning

I have always had a tough time with men. All of my life they had done me wrong. It started when I was pretty young, five or six, my dad walked out on my family leaving me, my brother and my mom to fend for ourselves. My mom wasn’t working at the time and she had to get two jobs practically over night to support us, she spent nights as a janitor at the local hospital, and evenings as a supermarket cashier. She would come home tired every day at nine o’clock in the morning after me and my brother had already gone to school. She slept all day until it was 5:30, time for her to go to her second job at the super market. She put my brother and I in 6 to 6 to make sure we were looked after during the day. We lived like that for three years, us barely seeing our mother, until she was just too over worked to continue. Then she sent my brother, Matt, and I to live in the suburbs with our grandmother.

Grandma was kind, but too old to really watch out for us like we needed. Matt, who was 11 at the time began running with some neighborhood punks who were getting him into trouble, all of which went right over grandmas head.

Some of the guys Matt hung with were fifteen or sixteen years old. They would sell Matt weed and later, speed for the money he stole from grandma.

At first I liked the boys. Some times when I would get home from school they would be there on the back porch, smoking weed and drinking. Occasionally, they would call me over and have me do them “Favors” for money. It started out being innocent things, They would pay me a dollar for a hug or a kiss on the cheek, but it soon begun to turn into bigger things.

The first time, one of the boys named Jeremy called me over to him. I went and he pulled me down onto his lap like he often did.