Part 1

I survived that first day...and the days that followed. I can't say I survived unscathed, but I think I came out a better person then I was going in.

I eventually gave up on hating my parents for moving me away to places unknown. Although, I'm not sure my dad has forgiven me for the phone bills I wracked up calling my best friend. What did he expect? I was, after all, a 13 year old girl.

Katie and I became friends almost instantly. I'm not sure what it was but we just clicked. It turned out that we'd met 2 years earlier at a church group with a mutual friend. We were pretty much destined to be best friends.
Tara was quiet and sweet, we had English together and she later told me that she thought I was kind of a snob because I didn't talk much. It didn't take long before the note passing and laughing between classes started.
Natalie was always the independent one, the girl that loved her friends but knew how to deal without us. I always envied that about her.

The four of us quickly became our own little group. We weren't the popular girls and we weren't the outcasts. We had each other and in the 7th grade, that was enough.

The first few months were still rough, even with new friends. It got to the point where my parents were pulling me aside, asking if I was okay because I went to school and then came home and hung out in my room. Truth be told, what else was I going to do? Of course, within a few weeks they probably wished they hadn't brought it up. It didn't take long before I was begging for a sleep overs, asking my dad to drop me off someplace or wanting to know if I could walk to Katie's house.
That's something else I should mention, my mom. She didn't drive then and doesn't now. It was always up to my dad to do drop off and pick up...and it wasn't always an easy task to get him to agree to. Still, he'd take his turn piling all of us in to our family car to trotting us off to the football game or the movie theater. I would secretly hate it when it was my turn, I would pray that he wouldn't be wearing his cut off jean shorts, smelling of cigarette smoke and beer. I'd keep my fingers crossed that we wouldn't run out of gas or pray that he'd actually remember what time to pick us up.

The rest of that year was rather uneventful. My friends parents were still trying to feel me out, trying to figure out if I was the bad seed. To some, I most certainly was and to others I was just that nice red headed girl. The reality was that I was somewhere in the middle. I was certainly no angel, but over all I was just too paranoid to truly be bad. My brother had done a pretty good job of scaring me into behaving, and no, not because he was such an exceptional big brother. More because I saw how difficult he made everything on my parents, I saw him drink and do drugs and I saw him scream and storm out of the house. I learned all 4 letter words from him and I watched as my parents would shake their heads and talk in hushed voices not knowing what to do. While I didn't know who I was or what I was going to be, some where I knew I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be that girl, the girl that put my parents through that again.

That first year in a new town with new friends and trying to be a new me, probably impacted my life more then I realize. The year was a bit of a blurr, lots of half memories...boxes of notes and note books filled with hearts and boys names that I would keep hidden beneath my school books. It wasn't until the following year that I actually started on the slippery slope that is "going out".