I pull in my driveway, park the car, and walk towards my house. I can already hear the yelling as I approach the door. I let out a heavy sigh as I enter the one place I dread more than anywhere else, home.
             Home was not always a place that I hated to be. When I was a little girl I stayed home all the time. My mother and I grew close because my father was always away on "business trips." My younger brother and older sister were always very close, but I had my mother and my cat, Pepper, so their relationship never really bothered me. As a young girl, I was very naive as to what was going on in my family. I think that I was aware that something was going on, but I never put it all together. Even so, one is only that young for so long, and one can not stay naive forever.
             My mother and father dated in college. My mother got pregnant before they were married and had an abortion in fear of him not loving her if she had the baby. The two of them were married a year later, and had a child the following year. The child was a girl and she was called Leslie.
             I came about approximately six years after Leslie. I think I came as a surprise, but probably not near as a surprise as my brother, Kristopher, who came a year and a half after me. So, because of the new additions to the family, we needed to relocate to a bigger house. We started building on some land in, Missouri, and moved in two weeks before Christmas when I was almost three years old. So, that is about it, and they lived happily ever after. If only that was the truth.
             One year after moving into the new house, my father suddenly had several "business trips" he had to attend nearly every weekend. On my fourth birthday party, my father was gone, unexpectedly, on another "business trip" that ended up lasting two weeks. There was a lot of fighting that winter. Summer and spring ceased to make an appearance at our house that year; it se...