Boom. The sound of thunder filled the damp air around me.



“Shoot,” I mumbled, as the rain soaked into every crevice that was visible. It rains here all the time. I sometimes wonder what this place would look like with sun, but it’s hard to imagine.
It was never sunny and bright. Just gloomy and cold. This is how I thought of the world, and almost everyone in it. I had broken my nine o’clock curfew, and I was walking in late and drenched to the bone. Dad will be pissed I thought. My dad is a jerk. This sums him up perfectly. He never gives a s*** about anyone. Especially me.
When I got raped a few summers back, he laughed in my face and told me I deserved it for being such a little baby all the time. That wasn’t the first time I’d been raped. My dad turned into a horrible nightmare after my mom died. To channel his anger and depression, he uses me as his punching bag. Every morning, and every night it’s the same routine. Get up, make Dick (which is what I call him behind his back, on account of me getting seriously beaten if he heard me.) breakfast, and stand by the wall and think hard of anything else but how much it hurt.
I am Taylor Wood. In all my seventeen years, I have never hated another person as much as I hated my dad. Walking through the halls of my house, I often think about that one day. I lived in Free Living. It was basically a hospital/ “crazy house,” but they never told us that. I was admitted on June 20, 1999. That was only 10 days since my neighbor Sam Weston found me. Sam is also seventeen. He is tall, has brown hair, and has beautiful blue eyes and a smile that kills.
He came to borrow something from my dad. Sam didn’t know what my dad was like. No one did, but me. My dad was always home, so he must have been worried that something happened, and let himself in. I was lying on the floor, bound and gagged. I briefly heard Sam’s running footsteps because I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I remember feeling weightless, but that lasted just for a short time. I woke up and saw Sam and a nurse by my side.