Only 49 Days Of Torture Left.

Sweet Home...Tennessee?

I'll be fine, I swear.

Parents, school, and the whole dumb thing.

The song “Sweet Home Alabama” always took some sort of effect on me that I couldn't explain. I blamed it on the fact that I was born in NASCAR Central (better known as Watkins Glenn) and lived in a dumpy little town in upstate New York. To me, that seemed like the most logical answer – after all, I lived across from the state pen, two blocks from the ghetto and didn't fit in at all. Thing is, when you live in Tu Pac's long lost brother's hometown, the whole “old-school rocker chick” thing doesn't exactly work out for you.

I grew up in many different places – most of them not in the best neighborhood. My main home, which was with my mother and step-father, was on a classic American street, two houses down from my grandmother and three down from my aunt. We lived in a beautiful Victorian home with a huge backyard and pool, complete with yippy little dog and white picket fence. The fact that it was only half a mile from the lowest of the low was defeated, because the neighborhood was a perfect place to grow up.

Where my father resided, however, was a different story. He's never owned a real house in his life. His fad is to rent a trashy apartment in a nasty little city some two hours away, move all his stuff in, and just as Tom and I were getting comfortable around the place, sweep it right from underneath us. He never really treated us right, always throwing a box of cheezitz at us for breakfast, skipping lunch, and serving dinner at around ten thirty at night (if you count one minute rice and some microwave chicken as "dinner"). His apartments never had heat, he had no cable or internet, no DVDs, and no children-friendly books (and by "children-friendly, I mean that Scientific America and the lastest edition of Playboy weren't exactly sutiable for our little minds). Board games were also out of the question. Tommy and I usually spent our days playing twenty questions or having multiple half hour staring contests. The whole weekend experience with our “loving father” was never highly anticipated. It was a thing to dread.

So, it was no surprise when we were on a visit to our father's parents' house one day four springs ago that Tommy and I fled. We made it two miles before we stopped in at Corning Tool Co. and called our mother to come pick us up. Of course, she called our father and it was all over. He came to pick us up and took us back to the house. There, we made a deal.

If we wanted to visit him, we'd call. If not, he'd leave us alone.

And that was that. No more Adam Taylor, no more weekend visits.

From then on, most things when perfectly. Weekends were free for sleepovers, and Friday afternoons weren't wasted worrying about the upcoming two nights that we'd have to endure the utmost torture and no food. True, it was the life.

But then things started going wrong again.

Adam seemed to feel that with no children in the house, that meant no child support checks, either. Soon, Mum was tripping over medical bills, and money was running low. Dad (dad, as in step-dad) was getting easily aggravated, and that only resulted in daily arguments between the two. The house was a mess. Our dog wasn't getting fed. The usual bright sun shine that looked down upon the neighborhood seemed to have vanished. Everything was looking down.

Then, somehow, we managed to dig ourselves out of the huge financial hole we'd sunk into, and everything was okay again. No more brownie mix for dinner. No more sitting silent in the living room with billions of candles burning when our power went out. No more hiding from the sun, who was hiding from us, and no more being stared at when you were pale as a ghost walking down the street. Everything was beautiful once more.

For now, at least.

As everyone knows/experiences, fitting into high school is probably the most difficult part of being a teenager. The diversity, various music scenes and multiple cliques make the freshman year hell. I spent most of mine trying to find my niche. There were the B-boys and B-girls, the techno punks, the Catholic angels, the heavy metal rockers, the cheerleaders, the preps and the jocks. What I was looking for was something in between. And to my surprise, I found this at a nearly empty lunch table in the cafeteria in the middle of May.

Now, it's clinically not possible for miracles to happen to people who don't deserve them. Everyone has seen the Christmas movies, and at least one movie about a cripple or some other damaged person, where the main character is graced with a golden opportunity to save their lives, literally or not. So it obviously seems that as I sat down at this dirty, sticky lunch table (at the time occupying only four) that what happened to me was no miracle. Who would have known, though, as I stared at my toe-fungus pizza and stabbed at it's blistering pepperoni, that I would have met the most beautiful stranger I'd ever seen, but that I'd already met many times before?

Yeah, that was exactly what happened. I looked up to see what acne infested nerds I happened to be sitting with today and found myself breathless because I was caught off-guard by some breathtaking dude that surely should be sitting with the cheerleaders who was staring right at me and smiling. We stared at each other for a moment, and then he got a confused expression. There was something about his facial expression that reminded me of someone I knew a long time ago...And then it all came to me. I was sitting next to...Kyle McCormack? Was that even possible? Because he'd moved to Wisconsin eleven years ago, and it seemed impossible that someone I'd missed for the past decade could've been sitting next to me. And I certainly didn't remember him being that attractive, even as a four year old. And then I finally said something, and he told me his name, and I told him that I knew. I introduced myself, and he said he knew that, too. Then I asked him where he'd been, and he said Wisconsin (duh), and I made a stupid joke about cheese.

Well, to me, this was nothing short of a miracle. Making a friend - a real friend, anyways - might sound like a simple feat to anyone but me, but honestly, I'm the most socially retarded in the entire city. It's sad. I'm sure if I actually allowed people to get to my emotional (or somewhat responsive) side, I'd have tons of friends and finding a date for prom two years from now would be simple. I could just pick a guy from the bunch that'd lined up outside my door. After all, my secret nickname is "The Silent Beauty" (definitely not chosen by me, I could beg to differ).

So, when I stumbled upon this charming discovery, I stole as much of it as I could. I had him over everyday, and I talked to him about stupid things that I never got to talk to anyone about, and I told him secrets that no one knew. Basically, I treated him like every other girl in the world would treat her BFF. But he didn't seem to mind. He was fine with it, and seemed to understand my mental need for a friend. He was the best thing that'd ever happened to me, ever.  Now, a year later, my explanation for him is still exactly the same: He's fucking awesome.

Moral: When life gives you lemons, punch him in the face and get some friends.