CHAPTER 1 #2
Then years passed, and it continued. Men would get bored and we moved on, but there would always be someone else – some lowlife pervert my Mum would latch on to.
It was her talent – finding sick, twisted men.
Eventually, I just started to accept it.
My Mum didn’t care when I told her about the things those monsters did to me.
She didn’t care what happened to me or who she subjected me to, as long as she was supplied with booze and drugs.
I could have run away, but I knew what it was to live on the streets too – I wouldn’t be any safer from the predators who pursued weak victims like me on the streets.
By the time I was thirteen my Mum was a disaster. She drank, she used drugs, and her paranoia and mental health issues were out of control. The days of her working, or even finding herself a boyfriend were over and she became a recluse in the shitty places we lived in.
I started trying to find any work I could do to keep us fed, when it became clear my Mum would no longer be doing anything to find any money.
I wasn’t in school anyway, and the years before had ensured I was very capable for my age.
I needed work if we were going to survive, but that didn’t work out well.
It turned out people weren’t keen on employing a very petite, young looking, scruffy, scrawny teenager.
That’s where the days of not having a roof or food came in.
For almost two years we survived on the streets, and in and out of shelters.
My Mum was forced to dry out a little, since she couldn’t get a hold of the drugs and alcohol she needed.
But it didn’t cure the paranoia. She dragged me all over the country constantly, and we hadn’t stayed in one state for longer than three months at a time since we arrived there.
Finally, when I turned fifteen I found myself a job in a strip club, while we were living in Chicago.
The manager didn’t care about paperwork or legalities.
He just wanted girls working his club who would keep the customers coming in, and apparently I fit that category.
I worked as a server, which paid shit, but the tips were amazing, and eventually I got a roof over my and my Mum’s head again.
I also managed to enrol myself back in school with my fake ID, and even though I was behind, because I had missed so much school, I worked hard to try and keep up, ever hopeful that I could eventually get my GED and do something to make my life better than it was.
At the club I worked every night and every weekend to keep the roof and the food that we desperately needed, and when my mother started to panic we were being watched, as she often did, and wanted to run, I refused, knowing the only way we could stay off of the streets was if I kept my job.
As time passed, my Mum became erratic and her paranoia got worse.
I came home one night and she had covered all of the windows with our furniture and boards she ripped from the hardwood floor with her bare hands.
She was out of her mind with fear and sure we were about to be killed.
From there her mental health got worse and worse.
I knew she needed professional help, but taking her to a doctor wasn’t an option.
Yes, she was paranoid and acting crazy, but she wasn’t completely out of her mind.
Her paranoia was based in fact. I had no idea if my father still searched for us, or maybe even Rafe too now.
I couldn’t risk our location being found, and I wasn’t confident that our fake last name of ‘Bailey,’ and the very poor counterfeit ID’s, which I had gotten for the both of us, would fool anyone.
Not to mention we were undocumented immigrants.
We had no visas to be living in the States.
Hell, we didn’t even have our passports by then, my Mum losing them somewhere along the way during the very first week after we stepped off of that plane. .
So I didn’t seek medical care for my Mum.
I just stuck my head in the sand and went through the motions of my existence – taking care of her as much as I could, going to school and failing miserably, then working my ass off into the small hours of the night every night just so I could keep us both alive.
I started buying my Mum alcohol to keep her quiet, and when that stopped working effectively, I went through a girl I knew at work, to buy illegal pills, which the dealer assured me would keep my Mum calm.
Now that was the only way I was able to leave her while I went out to work – drugged heavily with illegal drugs I didn’t even know the source of.
It was a shitty thing to do and I hated myself for doing it, but I had no other choice.
We couldn’t lose the apartment we had, and I couldn’t be there with my Mum when I had to work.
I’d quit school two years ago, at seventeen, to work full time at the factory.
My dreams of doing something to better my situation were forgotten as my life got tougher and tougher.
The future became something I didn’t even allow myself to think about, because all I could see ahead was the nightmare in which I was already trapped.
My Mum needed more and more drugs, and the money I made at the club wasn’t enough to pay for them, the rent, her alcohol, and food any longer.
As it was I barely ate, and my Mum was constantly screaming at me that she needed more drink and pills.
She had turned violent about eighteen months ago.
She constantly lashed out at me, and threw whatever was to hand at me.
She was almost half a foot taller than me, so she was hard to fight off when she really got into one of her rages, and I’d usually come out bruised and scratched.
But I didn’t blame her, because I was pretty sure it was the drugs and alcohol I gave her that made her that way, so it was on me.
“Bailey!” There went the yelling again. I put my head down and tried to get out of my head.
This little walk down memory lane wasn’t helping me.
I told myself again to just be grateful for what we had.
I’d sleep safely on the sofa in our apartment that night, and that was a lot after so many nights before of sleeping rough, in terrifying, unsafe places.
If I had to live this stressful, monotonous life to keep that safe place to sleep, then it was worth it.
It was dark and bitterly cold when I finished my shift and made my way out to the street.
I had my pay packet in hand. It was a measly amount for the work I did, but we were technically illegal workers and we had no rights.
I had to accept the pathetic wage because my options were limited, very limited.
It was at least enough to get some pills for my Mum.
We’d run out the morning before and I had paid the price for that when I got home from my shift at the club late the previous night, to be greeted by an empty vodka bottle flying at me.
I’d been exhausted and didn’t see it coming, so I didn’t have time to duck, and it had caught my shoulder, bouncing off of me with impact, then smashing against the hard wood floor.
My shoulder had been black and blue when I woke that morning and it ached badly all day.
Luckily, I wasn’t working at the club that night or I’d have had to cover it with makeup, since my uniform at the club left little to the imagination.
I pulled my thin and threadbare coat tighter around my already shivering body and started to speedwalk down the quiet street in the commercial area the factory was housed in.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before it was snowing and that meant I was going to have to bite the bullet and buy a new coat and boots.
The ones I bought from the thrift store the year before wouldn’t last another winter.
They’d both been pretty heavily worn when I bought them, but I’d had little money at the time, and this time would be no different.
Shaking off the depressing thought I pulled up my hood and lowered my head, walking into the wild wind.
I had to meet Justin, the dealer I used, outside the club that I worked at, in thirty minutes, and I had a long walk ahead of me.
After that I needed to buy groceries – though that was an optimistic term for what I could actually buy.
My shopping usually consisted of cereal my Mum could prepare when I wasn’t around, milk, ramen, – which was almost my entire diet – and liquor. Mainly liquor for my Mum.
“You’re late,” Justin snapped as I raced past the club and found him waiting beside his truck in the almost empty parking lot.
“Barely,” I replied with a roll of my eyes.
I was like two minutes late. Justin was an arsehole and I hated dealing with him, but it wasn’t like I could just Google another local drug dealer.
He was about a decade older than me, I guessed.
He was tall and thin, with dirty blonde hair that needed a decent cut and many, many washes.
He always wore loose jeans that hung down his backside and an array of oversized and grubby looking hooded sweaters.
Today his sweater was pale blue and at least three sizes too big for his skinny frame.
“Have you got them. It’s fucking freezing out here. I’m not hanging around!” I snapped.
“I’ve already been hanging around for ten minutes, waiting for your late ass!” he bit back as he stepped towards me. I knew he was trying to intimidate me, but I had seen and faced way scarier men than Justin in my life.
“Just give me the fucking pills, Justin!” I ground out. I was exhausted, freezing my arse off, and not in the mood to deal with him.