(no subject)

[badstar]

I came back from Switzerland a few weeks later and that summer, I found out that my best friend Alex, who I had met at the beginning of tenth grade, had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer…but they said it was treatable. She had surgery, and then chemotherapy, but was coming to school. Later on in the year things got worse though and towards the end of the year, she wasn’t attending school.

In the meantime, my brothers- who had always had disciplinary problems and had been diagnosed ADHD several years prior- started getting in trouble in school more and more. Things progressed through the year and I was looking at colleges. At this point, I was considering schools in Pennsylvania and nearby states, though by the end of my junior year, I started looking farther out due to learning of more distant schools with better departments for my major of interest. My father got put in jail for the first time for not paying child support- he was about $30,000 behind- and for not showing up to a court hearing. My grandparents bailed him out. Sometime around the end of junior year, my father started showing up in PA more often, usually with his new girlfriend, Kay (I don’t remember when he separated from Goldie) who, it seemed, was a bit of an influence on him- he was coming to visit and calling us more often at her insistence. Despite wariness due to previous experience, I really liked Kay. That summer, it was discovered that Alex had a brain tumor. It was removed successfully and found to be benign, but she began to get worse and never want back to school.

Shortly after my senior year started, I decided that I wanted to go to college in Texas- this had nothing to do with my father, he had actually moved from Texas before I started looking at colleges and was living in Nebraska at the time, still with Kay. Around this time, my brothers were starting to get in more and more trouble, and both- but especially Mike- had taken to running away a few times a week. E would sneak out the back door. Once or twice, he jumped out a window, a few times he just walked out the front door, he would walk to a nearby friend’s house and get a rise somewhere else, or would walk to wherever he wanted to go, or sometimes he just wouldn’t come home from school. At some point during that autumn, my mother had him checked into a psychiatric hospital for a few days…when he got out he started going to some outpatient program for a short time. In November, my father came into town for another child support arrearages hearing. He ended up in jail again. Later that evening, Kay showed up at my house to talk to my mother and stepfather about the situation- she tried to call my grandparents but they wouldn’t tell her anything. My mom and stepfather let her stay with us for a few days. One day, they loaned her a pickup truck to run a few errands and she vanished. We never heard from her again and the truck ended up being found five counties away four months later. While she was there, once again, I don’t remember how it all happened, but there was a massive blowup that involved my grandparents telling lies about someone, more insisting that they never lied to anyone and would never hurt anyone, more of them being right about everything when they were actually wrong…and Mike running away again.

Running away became a regular occurrence. Two or three times a week most often. My mom and stepfather were fighting about it. I was just trying to get through my senior year alive. I was on the tennis team, taking five art classes and several honors classes, dealing with my best friend having cancer and rapidly deteriorating, being unable to see her and only occasionally allowed to talk to her, dealing with my family, plus mounting tension at school due to a controversy surrounding the school principal. Early in the year, one of my teachers, who had also been one of Alex’s teachers the year before, decided that she thought I was in denial about Alex’s condition and made an appointment for me to start seeing the school psychologist- he informed me very quickly that he didn’t think that I was in denial at all, though could see that many things were taking their toll on me. I ended up talking to him periodically through that year. At the end of January/beginning of February, within a week the principal resigned, resulting in students walking out of school in protest several times- and as a result, constant police patrolling the school- and then Alex died. For a month and a half after that, I woke up, I went to school, I came home, I slept til dinner, woke up to eat and maybe do some homework, then went back to sleep. I didn’t want to go to school, but it was better than being at home. By this point, I was just trying to survive the year I’d applied to colleges in Texas, Alabama and Tennessee. I was accepted to the University of Alabama at that point, so I knew it was only a matter of time before I left, and I was still holding out hope for Texas. All I wanted was to survive and graduate….which I did.

There’s not a whole lot that I can say about the next two years. I moved to Dallas and I was happy. I never cried when I left. For the first time ever, I was really, truly happy. I was doing what I want, I had no one trying to turn me against anyone else, or lie to me about anything that happened in the past. It was all a million miles away, and even when I came back to PA to visit, it was ok. Then financial aid vanished.