You know those people, the ones who tell you to enjoy high school because it's the best years of your life? Don't you hate those people? They are always the jocks and cheerleaders who will look 45 years old when they're 23, or the school counselors who apparently loved high school so much they came back to stay. And yet . . . sometimes they are the best years. Not for the reasons you hear when you're in high school, but sometimes life turns out so bad anything is better. Even the drama-filled hell of high school. At the very least high school was a time before your life became what it is; before you got pregnant and before your boyfriend beat you up so badly you lost the baby. Before a life of happiness was an unattainable glimmer in your imagination. Life sucked then but it's a hell of a lot worse now.

You remember thinking, “Life goes on.” A kind of, “Make the most of what you have,” attitude. A lemonade kind of thing. But you don't think that way anymore. Why bother trying to make your situation better? So far you have succeeded only in making it worse. Years of optimism can get you down and you think you've hit bottom. You had to leave town, of course. After your boyfriend was put in jail for assaulting you and raping someone else, you were kind of the town freak-show. You had no baby to live for after all. Why not jump in the river? Why not drive off a cliff? Why not OD? So many options, all so easy.

But it's amazing what the kindness of one person can do. Someone you had never seen, someone no one else saw. You think it was an angel. How can you kill yourself when God sent an angel to save you? There's no way some random human person would pay for your meal and fill your crappy car with gas, enabling you to get to a place to stay. There's no way they could know you would stop at that motel, no way they could already have paid for it. And no reason for them to. And yet . . . that's what happened. Will you ever see them again, you wonder? What will you say if you do see them?

You didn't, though; and life went on, moving from one place to another, never knowing anyone or enjoying anything. The drinking was natural, of course; isn't it a required habit of someone like you? You had nothing better to do, no one better to spend your time with. No one who cared. And, yeah, you did at one point have a family. But why would they care about you? You betrayed them in every way possible; you lived with your druggie (and, as you found out, abusive rapist) boyfriend and dropped out of high school. You got pregnant at seventeen. You ruined your life. You tainted theirs. End of story.
Well, almost...