• The Mistake

    I knew the party was a mistake before we even arrived.  The mistake was the simple fact Jacob was going to be there.  I never knew what Melissa saw in him or that three years later, she had still not gotten over him.  I’m not sure what it was going to take to pull her away from him.  He had cheated…

  • Hopes and Prayers

    “How long have we been awake?”  I wondered as I exited the highway in search for another cup of coffee.  My mother and I were desperately trying to make it home for Christmas.  We had a late start and the holiday traffic held us up.  I was always surprised by the amount of people who…

  • Stepmothers

    “You don’t need to tell me what to do anymore,” I said out loud.  I was rehearsing what to say to my stepmother.  I was never at the top of her list of people she wanted to treat fairly and now that we had just spend the last week mourning and burying my father, I…

  • Tough Love

    “I’m really proud of you.  That’s what she’ll say to me next,” I thought.  “How can that not be the next thing she says?”  I am thirteen years old and have never heard my mother say one word that could be considered positive reinforcement.  Tough love was what my mom was all about.  I knew…

  • Revenge

    Alive time.  Dead time.  Those were the words repeated to me by mother so often when we were young.  At the end of the day when she was tucking us in, we would have to tell her what we did with our time and decide whether our day was spent more alive or dead.  We…

  • The Sporting Event

    I always wanted to go to boarding school, but now that I am here, I wondered what the hell I was thinking.  I thought it would be full of teenage drama and angst, rich kids with secret drug habits, but I was not as prepared for the level of commitment everyone had to athletics.  It completely blew my…

  • Moving Again

    When I stepped into a public school for the first time, I honestly thought my head was going to explode.  There were so many people.  So many colors.  So many new noises and smells.  What had I missed in the fourteen years of my life that I am just now getting to experience this for the first time.  My…

  • Modern Medicine

    I always wanted to live in the 1700s.  I question myself a lot about this due to the fact I am a hypochondriac and if a foreign object touches any part of my body, I am certain I am going to die.  So why I would want to live in the 1700s is beyond me.  Though I…

  • My Grandfather

    Growing up, I always thought of my Grandfather as the most fun (and definitely my favorite) family member.  Which is saying a lot since I grew up with dozens of cousins and second cousins who were in and out of our house constantly.  I was never in want of needing someone to play with as the house was always full of noise…

  • The Elevator

    I always took the stairs to our fourth-floor apartment.  Always.  In the four years I have lived in the building, I have not once taken the elevator.  No one understands my ‘fear’ of elevators, but it is really my serious dislike of small places and the possibility of someone else being in that small space with me.  I grew up with several siblings in…