Teen Ink

The One That Hurt the Most

It was a regular morning just like any other; the sun was hiding behind the Arizona winter clouds. My foster mom, Mrs. Stewart, was cooking pancakes; I could smell them from where I was sitting on my porch. Both of my parents had died in a car crash three years ago, some drunk had swerved into their lane, causing a head-on collision. Three other people had been involved in that accident, a twenty-two year old man on his way to his girlfriend’s house with a ring in his pocket. He got a broken arm, fractured collar bone, and amnesia. Although his would-be fiancé never gave up on him, they where never married, at least as far as I knew, I lost track of them about four months later. Beside my own two lives ruined. The second person in the crash was a fifty-nine year old man on his way to his grand-daughters tenth birthday, he died on the way to the hospital. The third person was a young girl, she was twelve and sitting in the back seat of the drunk father’s truck. She had a broken left arm and a nasty cut on her forehead. She stayed strong even in the hospital learning the news that her father hadn’t made it. And then there was me, Charlene ‘Charlie’ Muller, I was in the hospital for almost a month. I had been sitting in the back seat of our Camry; I had two broken ribs, a bad concussion and a fractured left arm. Everyone said I was being a strong, hanging in there, but when I was alone I threw in a crazed frenzy everything I could, just to feel the satisfaction of seeing it break. I was hurting so much; it felt as though my heart had been ripped out of my chest and stomped on. But after awhile I began to heal, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart where good people, they took care of me and loved me as there own. I went to live with them, but it wasn’t till almost a year after my parent’s death.
I was in the Foster System for nine months and I got into trouble along the way, I was hurting, I blamed myself at first, thinking I should have died with them. But I couldn’t bear to think if what they would say if they knew what I was thinking about doing. Not all of my foster families where bad, but the majority of them where. What made me finally snap was my foster dad in my tenth home. He came home drunk one day with a red smear on the front bumper of his car, I asked what had happened and slurring he said he had hit something. I completely lost it; I felt rage and hate boil up inside me, at the injustice of it all. That lousy drunk hadn’t even gone to jail for the three murders he had committed, no he had to go die in the same car crash he created, he didn’t live to see the pain he had put his own daughter through. The poor woman who had been waiting for that proposal for so long, the old man who had been so proud of himself for the gift he had gotten for his only precious grand-daughter. And there was me, I had lost everything in that crash, so screaming at my foster dad I called him a lousy drunk who didn’t deserve what he had, picking up one of the many beer bottles lying around I threw it at his face, hitting him in the head. Hours later in a police station crying hysterically I learned he had only suffered a small cut and a headache, but he pressed charges. I already had to strikes on my record for some fights I had gotten into, so this was the last one. I went to Juvy for two months as punishment. As I lay in my cell I pondered everything that had happened, I had almost ruined my life my snapping the way I did, did I really want the rest of my life to go on like this? I finally decided I was going to do everything I could to live right; I didn’t cause any trouble while I was in Juvy, and I did what I was told. My ‘cellmate’ Tiffany had almost gotten me into some more trouble in there too, she was in because she had torched her stepmom’s car (among other things) after another fight. She got four months in here with me; she had been a worse trouble maker than I had been. I was edgy though, I wasn’t the kind to be ok locked up in a place like a Juvenile Detention Center without getting antsy. I needed a way to release some of what I was feeling, so I asked for some notebooks and some pencils. I began writing down all that had happened to me over the past eight months, but I never realized that the release I had chosen would turn into the crazy memoire of my twisted life.