Truth

At the end of my eighth grade year, my dad received notification that he was being transferred to North Carolina. My parents were thrilled as this was home to them. Nearly all of their family, including their parents, lived there. My take was a bit different. I was distraught. I'd found happiness in Indiana and a niche I never thought I'd find. I had fiercely loyal friends. I was less than thrilled at the idea of giving all of that up. Nonetheless, we left that summer. For a while, I wrote letters to my friends in Indiana, letting them know how I was and offering advice for their problems in all my fourteen year old wisdom. The letters became less frequent until they ended altogether.

The high school in which I enrolled was huge. The entire population of the school I'd have attended in Indiana was smaller than the freshmen class at Millbrook. I came in. I stayed quiet. A few people tried to cozy up to me. It didn't take me long to figure out that these people were bad news. They stayed in trouble. I might have attached myself to these people anyway in the name of being accepted, but another group of people unwittingly averted them from my attention. It was a group of friends in the church my parents joined. They were a much more savory bunch.

As kids will do, this group of church friends asked me why I was on crutches. My response was the oddest thing. I still don't know why I did it to this day. "Oh... I was hit by a car." Maybe I even told them I'd just been in a car accident. The quirkiness of my response lie in my answer to the follow-up question. "When will you be better?" My heart sank. "It's going to be a couple of months."

I lived this lie for quite a while. They would ask when I arrived at church if I had any more news. I always answered no. Before long, I knew I couldn't keep it up. I sat this group of friends down after Sunday night church one night and told them the truth about what happened to me and that I wasn't going to get better. If they weren't going to reject me for my physical imperfection, I figured they surely would now because of the lie.

They didn't. Life moved on, and it wasn't mentioned again. Out of this church group, I even found my first boyfriend. He pursued me relentlessly. I'm still not sure why. He was a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed soccer player. I don't know what he saw in me, but he sure came after me. At first, I spurned his advances. I suppose I wanted to make sure he was serious. Finally, I relented and let him take me out. He gave me my first kiss, which I'll never forget. It had all the requisite sparks and tingles and light-headedness. He was a good kisser! Still one of the best I've ever known.

His attention wasn't enough to stop me from spiraling into a pit of self-destructive depression. I hated myself. I hated who I was. I hated my disability. I hated whoever was at fault for making it happen. The guy driving the car wasn't available, so I directed my anger toward my parents and toward myself. I talked frequently of suicide. Though I probably would have never done it, I did lots of harm to myself. I tried to run away from home. When I was caught, I was sent to a private psychiatric hospital. I spent four months there dealing with my issues, including the month of my sixteenth birthday. There are things that happened surrounding this time that I still don't want to tell anyone.

It ended, though. I managed to survive. I got a little better every day. I survived high school. I graduated when I was supposed to... perhaps not with the grades I could have gotten, but it was enough to get me accepted into college. I got jobs and paid for my own clothes and gas. Childhood had been survived with one useless limb.