I could give you a sob story about my alcoholic father and mother, and how I am practically a poor orphan girl living with her over-caring aunt. But that would just sound ungrateful, now wouldn't it?

Instead, I am just going to start now, where I am at this precise moment.

I am in the car.

The trees pass by in a blur of reds and yellows and oranges, making it look like the world is on fire. It makes me wonder where the fire trucks are, and why they are not putting the fire out.

Oh yeah, because there is no fire.

October is my second favorite month of the year, for this reason precisely. The colors.

My first favorite season is July. Not because of the 4th of July or anything. You know, that time of year when families get together and have picnics and sit around telling stories about childhood. I never had that. Again, I'm not even going to go there.

But because it is liberating. Usually by that time I am free to go where I want, whenever I want. School can't hold me back from going to the woods near my aunt's house and meeting up with my friends to hang around while they smoke and get drunk.

No, I'm not like that. I've seen what happens when people get that way, and I have always promised myself to stay off that path. But even so, I'm most comfortable around people who do that stuff; get drunk and high, get a hangover, then do it all over again.

It's all I really know.

My aunt leans forward in her beat up Chevy to turn on the radio. She turns up the volume dial, blasting me out the window. I look at the car next to us, a cute red prius, positive they can hear.

"Does it need to be that loud?" I ask, not looking at her. But I know that her cherry red lips are turned down in a frown, and her brown eyes probing the back of my head, like she cannot figure out what is wrong with me. I've seen that look many times.

It's ironic, really, because my aunt is a psychiatrist. It's her job to figure out what is wrong with people. But I'm like the sad figure in her success rate that pulls it down that tiny 1%. But she just cannot fix me. I'm perpetually broken.

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A story about a girl. Her mother is a drunk, her father hasn't contacted her in 7 years, and she now lives with her Aunt Sandra, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. To top it all off, it is the start of her junior year of high school at McKinley High, the newest in the line of many schools she has had to attend because of her flaky mother. Follow her in a coming-of-age story that teaches her that maybe not all things are as they appear. Including herself?

updated Jun 3 '11 by FutureBestseller1896