A Home That Wasn't Quite Right

 I've gotten quite a few responses to my posts on this blog. Most of which have been supportive while asking how I can stand to air out all of my dirty laundry. I just don't look at it that way. I have no emotional connections to most of the stories told here. There are a few flashes as if my mind took a screenshot once during each major event in my life but most of those are gone now. So it doesn't bother me to have other people know these things because I don't feel that my past defines me. I am a completely different person now. I am not ashamed of my past nor would it bother me to have this broadcast to the world. And I would rather have people read about my life here then have it come up in awkward conversation. If there is one thing I absolutely hate in this life its trying to tell someone the stories of my life when I can't quite remember them myself. This way, if there is anyone that cares to know me better, they don't have to ask me about it. And I like that just fine. :D 

 (Warning - this post includes a section not intended for children or very sensitive adults. It gets pretty dark. I cried just trying to write it. )

Tonight's post is about the little house that my family and I lived in when I was in sixth grade. As an adult looking back I believe that house to have been haunted by something quite evil. Our family changed irreversibly while living there. I journaled a lot during this time but most of it is the wishful dreaming of a troubled adolescent mind. I was so unhappy with the way that my life happened that I would write events in my journal with alternate endings. I would journal for weeks at a time without actually keeping to the truth. When I lied on the page I would put a little tick mark in the bottom corner, near the spine. I have entire filled journals that almost every page has a tick mark just because I hated so much about my life and I wanted so desperately for it to be different. The best example I have of this is when a boy in school called me ugly in front of the whole class. That night in my journal I wrote about how he had confessed his love for me instead and brought me flowers. I wanted, more then anything, to be accepted by those around me.
This place included memories like the first time I played Grand Theft Auto at a friends house, the first time I really kissed a boy, the first time I skipped school on purpose, the first time I ever tried a cigarette, my first experience with a poltergeist, watching moms husband play Unreal Tournament for hours, having that husband forget he was at home to watch me while I was outside (He left, locking me out. I had to sit on the front porch until mom came home.). Also while in this house my little brother Harry was born. Mom had gestational diabetes so during her pregnancy and after I got to play nurse and give her shots. This was around the same time that I "walked in on" my sister when she had two friends over to spend the night. They started spending the night at somebody else's house pretty quick after that night. I would find my sisters writing and read it as well. She, fourteen at the time, was just getting into writing some pretty dark stuff. I also had pretty unlimited access to her laptop while she was sleeping, this lead to some pretty dark stuff too. Also I ordered a playboy subscription in my mothers name at some point while in that house. I learned that Mega-Grounded is frequently spelled K-A-T-I-E.
My destructive anger issues were starting to show quite a bit. When mom would put me in the corner I would stand there and peel the green paint off of the back of the door. Drove mom up the wall. I would take scissors to my bed sheets when she'd send me to my room. Or use a screwdriver to dig holes in the drywall. I don't know how she put up with me. My sister and I were baptized into the church around then as well. I didn't want to be the only family member left behind but I didn't have a  testimony of my own for years.
At one point we had just gotten home when Beth went to take Harry out of his car seat and get out of the van. Her foot got tangled up in a seat belt strap and she fell onto the concrete with newborn Harry in her arms. The crack sound could be heard from across the street. Mom was immediately terrified that it was Harry's head hitting the pavement that had made the sound. Beth pushed him into her arms without getting off the ground. Mom and I jumped back into the van to rush Harry to the hospital. Beth couldn't stand up so she just scooted out of the way so we could peel out of the driveway. Came to find out that it was Beth's knee hitting the ground that made the awful cracking noise. Harry had a compression fracture running the length of his skull where she had pressed him into her chest so hard. He spent quite a while in the hospital recovering. Beth spent quite a while confined to the couch with a broken kneecap. She told her classmates that called to check up on her that she had been pushed out of a moving vehicle when one of her mafia deals had gone bad. That had the whole school believing our family had mafia ties for the duration of our stay in that town. We had a community mailbox about three houses down from ours that we had to walk to. The house it was in front of had a giant black bull-mastiff that was taller then me when it stood up on its hind legs. One time while walking to get the mail he attacked me. Mom was taking out the trash and saw a big black man running from across the street to pull the dog off of me. I had to show the bite marks on my ass to twelve people that day. :/

Our house was about three streets away from the main highway through Apopka and there were something like fifteen churches within a couple miles. Yet it was still the "bad" side of town. We were neck deep in drug dealers, gangs, and just generally scary people all the time. We were the only white family on that whole block for a while if I remember correctly. Mama put so much effort into making that house beautiful and safe yet it is still one of the scariest places I can imagine. In the year that I was there we were robbed a few times, had our windows broken out, the front of the house shot up in a drive-by, and had criminals out run the cops by cutting through our backyard into the construction site. Our fence had a pretty big hole in it for quite sometime.
We had a basement that was only accessible from outside, the back of the house. It was one of Beth's favorite places but it gave me the creeps. There was some kind of drawing on the wall like someone had let their kids play down there. But rather then be adorable it just looked scary in the dimly lit room.
Beth took on the "protector of the family" role pretty immediately after we moved there. I was only twelve and Harry was a newborn for most of our time there. She grew her hair out and stopped caring that it was wild and frizzy because it gave her a crazy look. She wore this black leather jacket almost every day and frequently carried around our aluminum baseball bat. She collected all the neighborhood cats until we had something like eighteen of them. Even though she and I didn't have the best relationship I knew she always had my back. Until one day when I had just pushed her too hard. I don't remember what I had done but she retaliated by screaming at me on the bus, in front of an entire neighborhood full of kids, that I would never get out of high school without becoming pregnant and some other hateful things. Even the people I had called my friends laughed at me that day. She starting distancing herself even more like she hated me. But to the people around us it just meant that she wasn't there to protect me anymore. She started missing the bus a lot because she either didn't go to school or she would rather walk the two miles it took to get there, baseball bat in hand.
Some of the older kids invited me to sit with them at the back of the bus. I was so eager to have real friends that I did. That's where I first met Oliver. Him, I remember. He started talking to me from the seat in front of me on the way home one day. I didn't really want anything to do with him. I'd see him at school a few times but he terrified me. His skin was the darkest I had ever seen but his teeth were so white, and his smile was just a little too big, almost Cheshire-like. This kid just radiated evil in everything he did. When I wouldn't talk to him he sat down next to me and started poking me. At first it was just in the arm, then my side, then my leg. I told him to go away and leave me alone. He laughed and smiled that evil grin saying that he knew I "wanted it" and was just playing hard to get. He put his hands between my legs and I tried to push him away but he was so strong. He made me feel so small and weak. I remember him saying that I was shaking like a sex toy so I must like it. I screamed and screamed but no one heard me. His buddies crowded around our seat, hiding us. The bus driver always had the radio on really loud and I had unknowingly sat right beneath a speaker. Eventually the bus stopped and the boys all went back to their seats before the driver could notice. I leaped up and ran for the door with tears streaming down my face. The driver didn't even look up as I went by. We were at my bus stop anyway. As the bus drove past me Oliver stuck his head out the window to give me one last Cheshire grin that still sends chills down my spine.
When mom got home from work she could tell something was wrong with me. I broke down and cried but I couldn't even explain it to her. I managed to get across that someone had touched me and she freaked out. She cried with me. She screamed at Beth, for having missed school that day and not being on the bus to save me. She tried calling the school but no one answered.  She sent me to bed where my dreams were filled with wide smiles in the dark. She woke me up at the crack of dawn as she was packing my suitcase. She wouldn't explain right away but Beth told me when she left the room that Oliver's family had shown up at the house in the middle of the night to threaten her and me for reporting Oliver. She was so scared that she called my father and got me on a plane to his house in Mississippi before 8am.
I lived with him for the next nine months which is exactly how long it took for mom to finish out her contracted time at that school and find us another town to live in. I drove back there once with Brian but i couldn't even pull all the way into the driveway. I immediately felt that same evil vibe that I had felt while living there. Whatever was in that house had only gotten worse in the years that we had been gone. And I wanted nothing to do with it.
Please feel free to comment your additions to this memory if you were involved or message me with any thoughts/questions. I really do love hearing how other people perceive my memories.
Thanks for reading. ~