The first time someone touched me, I was too small to know it was wrong.

It was a game. The first time. The first person. The second time. The second person. The neighbor drinking beer on his deck. My best friend's stepdad buying us wine coolers and suggesting we play strip poker. If you don't behave, I'll tell your Mama you were drinking and smoking cigarettes. All grown up games that I knew not to speak aloud.

I watched cop dramas and movies about victimized girls. Heard stories on daytime television, but I never associated those girls with myself. My case was different, because I didn't suffer. I didn't have issues. Nothing that ever happened to me made it past my surface, or, at least, that's what I believed.

But it did. In the most subtle, whispering way, all that bad wormed its way deep inside my brain and clouded my judgement. I searched for wrong without knowing I was looking for it, and what I found was the end to it all. To me. To a girl I could have been had I'd just been left alone.

In the Spring of 2002, I was a fourteen-year-old eighth grade student who'd finally found her place in the seething world of puberty ridden teenagers. I had guy friends with obscene jokes that made me ugly laugh in the middle of class. Girl friends to share clothes, makeup, and gossip with. A boyfriend a few years older who was tall and sexy and provoked girls to come up and tell me how lucky
I was.

I had everything that Spring.

We spent our days in groups, smoking weed beside the muddy-watered rivers and cool, flowing creeks. We went on adventures through the woods and jumped off bridges into unknown water with no fear of injury. We were invincible, forever young, and all of us were bonded together by shared hardships, and a desire to break rules.

Missing fathers. Dead mothers. Abuse and neglect. Poverty. Everyone had a reason why they were so ready to rebel, even if we didn't know it at the time.

Samantha was my closest friend that year. She lived with her constantly working widowed father in a trailer without running water. We spent hours singing along to Craig David CDs and talking about boys. We bounced around the trailer park, getting high with said boys and taking long walks up and down the dirt road. We shared secrets and dreams and formed a bond reserved only for the young.

Whenever I wasn't with Samantha, I was at Johnny's house, swooning over and over again that he was mine. Back then, boys were like jeans. The better they were, the better I looked, and in my mind, Johnny was that designer brand my Mama could never afford to buy. He'd furrow his brow and pout, smoldering me with his signature look, and he was surprisingly sweet—when other girls weren't around.

I pinned it on the fact that he was being raised by a single mother. It was the oddest combination. He was a notorious flirt, yet at the same time, he had a huge amount of respect for all females and was quick to fight if he felt one had been mistreated.

I loved him, and not in the way a young girl thinks about love. Even now, looking back, I feel nothing but fondness for him, and perhaps a bit of regret for the way things went down. I wonder sometimes, if he knew how horrible my life got, would it make him feel better? Would it satisfy him to know that the reason I chose to end things with him was the same reason I have nightmares?

Maybe, but I like to think not. I like to think that he's still that sweet boy—lover of all females—who would get angry on my behalf, even now, even after.

I'm telling you all this, dear reader, so that you can understand a bit of who I was prior to the murder of my youth. I fought for my destruction with everything I had in me, wanting to burn, and even as everything I loved fell away, I was convinced I'd found paradise.

***

I remember my brothers building elaborate contraptions when I was small. A little marble would start in a funnel, then travel down loops and over levers, toppling dominos, sticks, or whatever else they'd used to form the next reaction in the chain. I loved watching the little ball go, and begged for a turn to build it. But I was too little, and by the time I was older, they'd grown up and moved away.

This is the way I view my life. Actions. Reactions. A not-so-well-rounded me rolling wherever the maze dictated.

Samantha had two older sisters. Jess, who was only a year older than we were, and Tanya, who was grown with a husband and two children. Tanya had a different mother, who was still alive, and the middle of the three girls had moved to live with her across the country. Hence, why Samantha was all alone most of the time.

That was the beginning. The funnel that made Samantha and I so close. She was lonely, I was bored, and we lived within walking distance of each other's homes.

The domino was when her two sister's, husband and children in tow, moved back into town and piled inside her Daddy's trailer. As a virtually only child, with two brothers much older and gone away, I loved the bustle and excitement that occurred when all three girls were together. They looked the same, all thin and pale with long, straight blonde hair. They acted the same, laughing and always searching for something to fill the unbelievable boredom that existed before the more technological current age. They did each other's hair and makeup, and stayed up late drawing tattoos onto each other's skin with magic markers. And they accepted me. Right away. The two toddlers called me Auntie, and the husband, Boe, acted as if I'd always been around.

But the trailer was cramped, and the relationship between Tanya and her father was strained. Arguments started not long after they arrived, and it didn't take long before they were searching for somewhere else to live.

Another domino. Boe meets Reece—the neighbor at the end of the street—and the two hit it off. The ball rolls down a chute as Boe tells Reece about their situation, and it hits a lever as Reece introduces him to his brother, who has a spare room at his place.

Another domino. I remember it. The first time I saw him. He was in the passenger's side of Reece's truck. Reece brought him over to introduce, and Boe was by Reece's window, dipping in the say hello.

It was dark, the moon was bright, and silver light offered me a glimpse of his jaw, his chin, the tip of his nose, the rest of him obscured by shadows. Something about him caught my attention. Not because he was handsome, though he was. But at the time, I couldn't see enough of him to know that. No. It was something else. Like I knew, even then, that something was happening. Some action had occurred. Some reaction would take place, and things would never be the same again.

He sounds mysterious because he was. He sounds appealing because he was. He sounds dangerous because he was. And that, dear reader, is why I'm choosing to show you.