Shonheit. When the umlaut is there (the 2 dots/one line over the o) are there it means beauty, and without it it has no meaning. I chose this name because I don't feel like dealing with people that I know, I know exactly how they will react to what I say and what they'll do. And this is the type of name they would never link to me. But they might piece it together because of the names and stories anyways. Hopefully this will not be found though because it's going to have some deeper things in it that I would prefer no one to know... But I have to write them.

It feels like my life keeps going around in circles.

Just another day, wake up, feed the horses, shower, go to school, work some days with a boss that I hate and people who I'm not sure even like me, then I get to come home to a father that bothers the hell out of me, horses again, every other day dishes and some weeks pots, then I get to feed the dogs every 3rd day. On weekends I go out with my sister or to someone’s house that I don't even really care for at all. I should probably explain that this wasn't how it always was. About 8 years ago my cousin introduced me to a girl name Alyssa, after awhile we were all the best of friends, but of course all good things must come to an end. We all got in a senseless dispute when we were about 10 and we all stayed enemies for awhile.

I made up with both of them but they still to this day have not resolved their issues, but now they are at least civil towards each other. Well this girl Alyssa is/was my cousin Mary’s complete opposite, she got into smoking and drinking and stealing where as Mary got into anime, literature, and things like DDR. For awhile I assumed that I'd be best friends with both of them forever because we had the sort of bond that would and could not be torn down... I was wrong like usual. Well I guess I was only 1/2 wrong though... let me explain further...Mary and I occasionally hung out, usually because a family party would bring us together, and while we only live 7 minutes apart, the time spent together just kept decreasing with Mary and the time with Alyssa kept increasing.

By about age 15 or so I had already stolen from stores, smoked Weed, gotten pretty plastered, done Aderol, gone to college parties, done mushrooms, gotten with guys that I didn't really know, and just seemed to be a different person, or so I was told by the people who knew I was doing all of that. Actually looking back I think that all happened about when I was 14. I'm only 16 now, but for one reason or another I've always had a horrible memory and only remember the small unimportant memories that are like 2 seconds long. Maybe I should start this back even further... ok that's what I'm going to do. When I was 3 we were living up here in Pennsylvania on my mother's mom's old farm house.

My dad's job transferred him so me, my mother, my father, my sister Becky (3 years older than me) Mike (5 years older) John (10 years older) and Dan(11 years older) along with our dog and cat moved down to Texas for my dad's job. It was obviously a good paying job if he was willing to travel there for it and also keep a family of 7 together... but that's another story. So we lived there for a year, in that time I went to my first school, it was a gymnastics preschool and I adored it. After about a year down there we came back up to our farm house and we've been living there ever since. As I grew up (about 3-10) I did tons of stuff. I played Softball, Volleyball, did gymnastics, learned to ice skate, learned Piano, learned to sing a little, learned a little Saxophone, and learned how to be tough by playing goalie for my eldest brother (soccer, hockey, etc...) and a whole bunch of other things. I couldn't tell you what specifically made me stop because I do not remember when I stopped doing all of these things, but if it was at age ten like I predict, I can attribute it to one thing.

When I was 10, I was at a catholic school that was somewhat close by, along with all my other siblings that had gone before me, it ran k-8. My brother John was 20 at the time and had acquired a job at a local grocery store, obviously with a job at that age you have to make friends, but John’s friends never seemed to be quite normal, because well he wasn’t normal himself. He's a very quite nerdy type of guy but has a pure heart of gold which most people don't realize. I think he was quieter than he would have been if he was the oldest because my oldest brother, Dan, was the popular cool attractive guy in school and since they are only a year apart that kind of cast a shadow down over John.

Dan was the devil child, running around like a mad man with a horrible ADHD problem, and John would just observe and then later on begin to run on his own course. Then there's Mike, who as of now thinks the world of himself. He studies philosophy and is in fact very smart and a good debater, but like everyone else has his flaws, such as very impatient and can’t deal with his anger very well. When he was going through high school and middle school he would be seen as the quieter one of a group of bad kids. His choice of friends was basically the same as Dan's which made John even more of an outcast, it was just one more thing that they shared and John didn't. Mike and Dan were/are both pretty athletic, Dan used to lift more and play more sports but over the years has let himself slip away because the hold of the alcohol and cigarettes has over taken him.

Mike on the other hand works more towards physical perfection now more then ever. He makes sure he always has a 6 pack and massive arm muscles, but does it naturally by lifting, no pills. John never got into those things and instead turned to the computer and video games... which pushed him farther away yet. Then there’s Becky, not your average girl. She was the only one of us who went on to go to a good highschool. Dan switched over from catholic school to the public schools before 8th grade, while John waited till high school to switch over and Mike waited for high school as well. With me it was a fight though, my mother and all her sisters have gone to the same high school, it's a catholic academy about 20 minutes away and they wanted for me to go there with all their might. They loved it even more and had even more of a connection because my grandmother went to the college that is tied in with their high-school.

My grandmother wants all her grand daughters to go so badly that she offers to pay the tuition of every year we are there. Which what started for my sister at about $7,000 is now up to about $10,000. My sister got in without even being put on the waiting list which is somewhat hard to get. They select the top 150 or so and then they put the other people on the waiting list and figure out who they can take. It’s a very small, rich girl school.

My cousin Sara on my mother’s side had been taken immediately as well, and then my cousin Evie joined in on that. My cousin Mary, who is Evie’s little sister, was put on the waiting list and then it was my turn. Mary mind you is a year older than me so there was a space gap. I had transferred to the public schools in 6^th grade because I couldn’t take the people there anymore. The girls there were horrible people, making fun of me and another one or two girls basically every day. By the time I was to be going into 7^th grade I couldn’t handle them anymore and after several long chats convinced them to let me attend public school. My mother knew that I should go there and that it was not a good life at the catholic school, I would come into her room about once a week and cry my eyes out because of what the girls had done, or how I had been treated.

She would rub my back and listen and try and convince me things would get better, but I told her I couldn’t take 2 more years of that. My dad was the main problem who said that he didn’t want me going to public school because he thought I’d screw up my life like my brothers had. I begged and begged and then finally I won. When high-school rolled around I had my mind set on the high-school my brothers had attended but my dad would not hear of it. By then he was certain that the public high-school would ruin me. We finally bargained and they told me if I took the entrance test for the catholic academy they would consider the public school. I reminded them several times that if I went to any of the surrounding catholic schools I’d be stuck with the same type of girls, and possibly the same girls from middle school for the next 4 years. I ended up missing the entrance exam for my mom’s high-school but my parents decided if I took one for another local catholic school then we could send the transcripts to them and get results.

After a month or so we got a letter, or maybe it was even a call, I can’t remember, saying that I was being accepted immediately and they wouldn’t even put me on the waiting list. My parents thought that would make me want to go to that school but it didn’t. Finally I won after repeatedly telling them that it wasn’t fair that they weren’t letting me do something because the boys had messed up. Anyways back to the point that brought us here. My brother John was making all sorts of strange friends, who my parents said we had to accept because they were his friends. They never hung around here, they were always going out and “role playing” which is basically a fantasy game filled with wizardry and all sorts of mumbo jumbo crap like that, the type of things you laugh at someone who’s 35 for doing. They dress up and pretend to be a warlock and play this game with a group of other people just like them. He had this one friend who he met through his job though. I will only reveal his first name because I can barely think about his whole name without vomiting.

They had been friends for awhile and as always I was interested in other people’s affairs, and trying to hang out with the older crowds because that’s all I had, all I had were the older people who seemed to love having me around. Unfortunately this guy Jim wanted me around for other reasons. At age ten I could not see the reason why someone about the age of 22 would be attracted to someone of such a young age as 10, and I did not think there was much I could do. Whenever John would invite him over to hang out, I would intervene and asked if they wanted to play Uno because at the time that’s all I really could or wanted to play, plus I knew Jim had a couple packs of Uno cards with him every time he came.

Through the course of events, several times, these times we spent playing Uno resulted in him molesting me. He would slide his leg up my shorts under a blanket when my father was in the same room. That killed me the most, is he could get away with things like that while one of my parents was in the same god damn room. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be upset or not so I didn’t say anything figuring it would go away and we could just go back to playing card games and strictly card games. Several times from the pathway from the kitchen to our library (a large room with hundreds if not a thousand or so books in it) we would be walking through the playroom, which was never and is still never used as anything because it always has the worst temperature and smells like the basement, and he would tell me to stop walking.

I still remember not knowing why he was doing this, and sometimes I wouldn’t stop and would pretend not to hear him, but other times he would slide his hands down my shorts and proceed to perform with things like that. Finally when I couldn’t bear this any longer, and I began to realize that it wasn’t normal I decided I should tell someone. If I remember correctly the first person I told was Alyssa. She was very shocked and kept telling me to tell Becky. It killed me that after she saw how horrible I looked when I told her, she wanted me to tell ANOTHER person. It was obviously the right thing to do, but I was very hesitant to do this because I didn’t know what to do at that point. I remember when I first told Becky we were at my grandmother’s house, who lives a couple houses away from Mary and Evie, and is also down the street from Alyssa, which means about 7 minutes away.

As soon as I told her, she believed me which at the time didn’t seem like it wouldn’t have been an issue, but then she told me that I should tell Evie and Mary who were in the next room. The next room over still had the same darkish brown wood flooring and everything but it was called the dining room because there was a small divider. They heard Becky say their names and came running over asking what was going on and how I should tell them what it was. As I remember, it was more that they wanted to know because it was gossip and didn’t think it would be anything serious. I protested more then I did with Alyssa, because where Becky was my sister and she’d eventually find out and could possibly help, Evie and Mary wouldn’t be able to do jack about it. Don’t get me wrong, I love them and their mother and their little sister Gini (who is deaf), Bob (who is autistic) and Naomi (who’s father is different then the other girls but we are related by our mothers’ side so that does not really matter.)

I figured they would be compassionate and understand, but I was dead wrong. At the time they did not say much but “Oh that’s really bad” and later I found out that Evie who is about Mike’s age but is friends with Becky, said that she thought I was making it up. I cried so hard when I heard that, how would someone at age 10 be clever enough to link horrible tragedy with pity and love, and then make up such a clever scheme? When I was crying it wasn’t so much that Evie had said it, rather that anyone had said it. It made me regret telling anyone, and I felt awful about myself and angry at everyone at the same time. A day or so passed and my sister decided that I should tell my parents. By that point I was tired of getting told to tell other people what happened and pleaded with her to have her tell them for me. She said no because this was something I had to deal with. I felt like I was about to die. I think Becky told them I had to tell them something or maybe she even told them what happened but that they should come to me to verify everything. I remember it was night time when it finally happened.

I was in my room trying on clothes and getting ready for bed or maybe it was even just getting to dinner, but my parents came up and knocked on my door. I prayed like I never had before in my life that it would be something unimportant like dinner’s ready or bed time, but even I knew better than that. As we began the conversation by the first questions I was bawling and curled up on my bed with my favorite baby blanket from childhood which I had continuously used to soak up my tears for years, and was now cleaning my face of the newly arriving tears. My mother being the sweet woman she is was trying to comfort me but talk at the same time to find things out, but my dad doesn’t like that approach. He seemed especially cold that night, as I cried and tried speaking at the same time he finally couldn’t take it anymore and with a low agitated and somewhat angered voice told me to stop crying and tell them what happened. I went into shock for a moment.

How did he expect me to stop crying at the drop of a hat? Did he know what happened and no longer see me as his little girl that he played baseball with and gave piggy back rides as a child to? Did he think that I was lying? Maybe he thinks that I’m disgusting for letting this happen, I deeply regretted telling anyone about it because I would have rather been molested than seen the look in my dad’s icy blue eyes and his angered voice when he said that. The fact that he wanted me to stop crying made me cry even harder though, I was gasping for air and choking on tears trying not to look up because I was so ashamed.

It seemed so unfair that I had to spill the worst event in my life to him because he said so, and without showing any emotion. After that night I felt as though whenever I did anything or anything horrible was done to me it was my fault. I stopped sharing most of my life with basically everyone. For the next few years I became closer and closer with Alyssa, experiencing things for the first time with her, having sleepovers every weekend and talking about our hatred for certain people. During 9^th grade she began hanging out with a girl that we were both already friends with named Dana practically every day. I wasn’t too upset because they live down the street from one another and go to the same school etc. so it’s not like I could be mad at her for having a life outside of me. It never occurred to me that I would end up losing her to the changes that began to take place when I was not around.

 Around the beginning of 10^th is when things started seeming suspicious. We had already been a duo when it came to everything; drugs, parties, stealing, alcohol, and everything else you could think of. She began ignoring my calls, talking about me behind my back, not telling me that people were talking about me (I was always telling her that if people said things about me, I wanted to know so that I wasn’t wasting my time on people who didn’t even want to be around me), lying to me about talking about me and she seemed more distant when we talked on the phone, she never had time to talk (most likely because Dana was on the other line but she lied about that too), not inviting me out on weekends, ignoring me completely when she finally did invite me over, and several other things that just were not like her.

I watched her do it to dozens of people throughout middle and high school. Out of nowhere, maybe because of the influence of another friend, she would begin to slowly close them out of our group. She always seemed to rely on me to do those crazy dares, go places that our other friends were afraid of, try things they wouldn’t with her, and I was just there for her. I told her my deepest secrets, and when she tried to keep hers in I’d pry them out. I constantly told her how much I loved her because I knew she had a problem with that, as do I, and showing emotions. It was hard for me to tell someone I loved them because I’d never felt that way about a someone before, but I knew that this friendship was doing us both good, and if we could each just have one person to show emotions to, things would get better. In a way, we were the same person too.

Neither one of us trusted others, we decided what we were going to do and didn’t ask for assurance from others, we dressed the same and swapped clothes, we constantly lied to our parents and friends to get them to back off, we stole small pointless things and clothes from stores, and we both used the drugs as our escape. The odds that 2 people who are so alike could live so close and actually meet drives me crazy, but what’s even crazier is that in the end it would backfire. By February of this year (2005), we had been bothering each other with or without even knowing it. I would tell her when I thought she was mad at me and ask her what was going on, she’d say nothing and then act like it was fine. Finally when I found out she had been talking about me, and lied to me about what she was doing the night before I couldn’t take it anymore. I called her and we got into a huge fight. She told me I was on a downward spiral and I was a horrible person. I tried reasoning with the fact that she did the same things and she tried justifying her problems with the fact that she was diagnosed with depression.

That drove me mad as well, if there’s one thing that Alyssa did not do it was make excuses and use depression to justify something. We were about to have the worst fight ever, and the last. I kept asking her if we should try being friends again in a year or so when things have changed and she kept responding with “I don’t know are you to have changed?”, and making the whole entire fight my fault. I told her I knew I was a bad person but if she was going to deny her faults as well then this was not going to go far. She continued by telling me that all her friends hate me but a small handful. After all was said and done it began to hit me what was happening.

My closest friend who I shared everything in the world with, who I spent all my free time with, who helped me out when I needed it and who was always trying to cheer me up when I was sad, was now telling me that I was a horrible person, that everyone hated me, that I needed help, that I was a pathological liar, and many other cruel things. I immediately flashed back to all the times I felt as though our friendship would stand the test of time. Some times we would even plan out what college we would go to, and how we would have 2 apartments that we would share with our friends Ronald and Rocky. We had made several run away plans, since we were little ranging from going to California all the way to going to a beautiful island. We had planned road trips and trips over in Europe.

We had started several bands together, gotten each other dozens of gifts for birthdays, holidays, and because we just could. We shared guitar playing tips, and songs. I had taken her into my home when her parents were acting horribly and she had taken me when I needed to get away. We snuck out in the middle of the night together, to walk through Ambler, get on trains, go to parties at Drexel, and just go over to the 7-11. We shared the same favorite bands, movies, foods, clothes, jewelry, humor, style, and attitude. We believed each other without a moment of hesitation and stood up for one another no matter the circumstances. We pushed each other farther in life to get what we wanted. We fought in many debates against pro-choice and anti- war/ anti-bush supporters.

We had made plans about when we were older she’d be a doctor, and I’d just live in her house, and all this other crazy stuff that we knew wouldn’t happen but we loved to pretend. We based when we would go to college and where according to where the other went, she said she’d wait a year for me so we could be in the same year and so I wouldn’t have been left behind for a year. We went job hunting on foot for months to find jobs to pay for all our debts. We always knew what the other one was thinking, but not in a bad way, in an amazing way. Up until this year she was the most real person I’d ever met. All the other phonies were washed away by just her aura. We picked out who was real and who was just trying to seem important enough to be in our presence for a second.

We could see through each others facades, when everyone else bought it which is how we helped another. I knew when she was trying to hide things, like when her father and mother would slap her around because they blamed her for everything, and she would get when I was trying to forget about when Dan would slap me for not doing something. I remember one time at a family party he slapped me and my eye started to bleed, and Alyssa took care of me. She got me an ice pack and a wash cloth and got me medicine for the pain. While my mother told me she’d talk to him like they always said, and that he’d mature when he got older, and kept feeding me lies. Things she thought I wanted to hear.

But what I wanted to hear was the truth, and at the time it didn’t seem plausible that it was the truth. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother, but their talks with my siblings don’t do anything, they should realize that by the fact that they still do the same things just more stealthily. I also love my brothers; no matter how much pain they put me through I know they love me. When they found out about John’s friend Jim, they devised a plan with 2 of Mike’s closest friends that are practically like brothers to me as well. They may not be thinking clearly all of the time, but they do love me as well. Dan has told me several times that he loves me, that I am his baby sister and he’ll always be here for me to protect me from anything, and so will Mike, John, Pat Hinnegan, and Rich Antzak.

While I hear them telling me that they love me, and while I hear my mother, father, and sister saying it, it’s still difficult for me to believe that someone could actually feel so  strongly in a good way about me. My sister recently was introduced to the reality that is my life. People had been telling her that I smoke and drink and all of that, so she assumed it was true because I am a teenager. We finally had a big long talk about the drugs, and my thoughts on everything, and she told me she didn’t realize I was this upset. She didn’t know that when I tried running away a year a half ago it was because of our dad, and how my parents didn’t do anything about the situation with Jim but they made me tell them anyways, and the other things. I also began to break down, and I told her about how I tried to kill myself by over dosing on Tylenol in 8^th grade.

I have no more energy to finish this right now. Through writing and then reading what I've written I've cried more then I've cried in a long time.