In East Kentucky It's Real - Part 1

You are six years old.  You live in a trailer park on the hill.  Sometimes the rats and mice chew the noses and fingers off of your dolls.  Your mom found a dead one in a pot one morning and cried.  Your friend has told you there is a witch that lives in a house up a side holler that has a graveyard in it.  It scares you when you walk passed there with your dad at night.  This friend is a little older and right now she is drawing pictures of nude people and tying them to these puffy white flowers that grow on a bush.  You call them snowballs.  She takes the flowers with the attached pictures and throws them through the opened window of the trailer where the new boys moved in.  They're teenagers.  She's ten.  She wants a boyfriend.  Suddenly, as you both are ducked behind the bush, one of the boys pokes out his head and invites you and your friend in.  You go in and they direct you to a room.  The room is empty all but some boxes and a mattress on the floor.  Before you know it, one of the boys throws you down on the mattress, climbs on top of you and begins kissing your mouth.  "You want to kiss little girl?" he says.  "Here's a kiss."  That's how you learn what boys and men think about girls.  It won't be the last thing you learn in that trailer park.  Far from it.

Across from you sits your sister.  She has a different mother and father.  She belongs to your stepdad, but you feel like you were cut from the same cloth.  You've been best friends since you were eight.  You're 14.  She's nine months and three days older than you.  She says, "I don't know what to do."  "What?" you answer.  "I'm pregnant."  Her boyfriend was much older.  She began to cry.  "What do I do?" she asked, beginning to punch her fists into her lower belly.  "I have to make this go away."  "It'll be ok.  We'll figure this out," you say.  You don't know how, but you know that you won't let anyone do anything to hurt her.  You would risk your life for her.  No one.  No one knows you like she does and never will.  You both manage to keep the baby a secret until at 5 months along your sister becomes very ill and the pregnancy is discovered.  She spends the next several days on the couch at your house in and out of a fevered delirium.  Everyone is really quiet and somehow you are relieved.  Later on, when you ask permission for her to come to one of your eighth grade dances eventhough she attends a different school, you are excited when your guidance counselor says yes.  As you begin to go in the building for the dance, this same counselor looks at your sister's stomach and asks you to call your parents to come back because they can't let your sister in.  The night ends with alarms, cops, a ride in the police car, accusations, and your boyfriend trying to save the day.  You are a straight A and B student.  Always have been.  Always will be.  Yet, you and your friends are treated as if you are a problem.  You realize that day what people really mean when they call you a "freak".  In November when your sister has her baby, your parents make you stay at school. You feel like throwing up because you told her you would be there.  You thought you'd be there.  When you go to the hospital, they won't let you see her.  They won't let you see the brand new baby that you were the first to know existed.  There wasn't anything to save you from.  Why were they keeping you away?  Your sister breastfed and had an unmedicated birth at fifteen.  That day you learned the power of a woman from a teenager.  From that day on, she has been your hero.

 You find yourself stretched across an unmade bed with your friends half dazed in a trailer heated by a coal stove, covered in what can't be just simple mess - it has to be debris?  There are places where the daylight seeps through between floor and wall.  Cats are on the counter eating some foul smelling leftover chicken.  Something has to have happened here.  Right?  Nothing happened there but life, the life of teenagers unsupervised by a mentally ill middle aged woman who very occassionally raises her head and mumbles incoherently from her place stretched out on a couch as you and your friends pass through?  This is normal and every day here.  The boys who live here write poetry and think deep thoughts.

Working at McDonalds pays your rent.  You've been working there since you were 16.  Now, you are 18 and living in a house with four other people and paying your way through your general education courses at the community college to save money.  You got a Rotary Club scholarship.  It paid for your books.  You'll spend the summer wondering how you will emancipate yourself from your parents so you can use only your income on your FAFSA and actually receive enough financial aid to pay your way through college.  No one is going to pay it for you  The only college money you had was from your great grandmother who took it from you and allowed others to spend it when you decided to move in with your dad in order to get away from a bad friend situation when you were 15.  Now, you pay for everything.  Medical bills keep coming from where you cracked your tailbone and realized after going to the hospital that your step mother really wasn't going to help you pay for it.  In this moment you are sweaty.  You smell like french fries and dehydrated onions.  Your manager has had you and another female co-worker scrubbing the stainless steel and baseboards with toothbrushes to prepare for a health inspection.  You both are begging him for a break.  With a greasy smile, he says, "No, bend back over there and keep scrubbing so I can see that ass."  Your heart burns, but you don't know what to do.  You can't walk out of there just yet.  You have bills to pay and want to go to school.

At the trailer park where you live a bleach blonde woman is your neighbor.  She listens to the same Uncle Kracker song over and over so loud that you can hear it inside your trailer.  It drives you nuts and makes you laugh at the same time.  Her husband is a Mexican man.  He's nice, but seems inebriated most of the time.  They have twin boys.  One of them has fetal alcohol syndrome.  His mother shares that with everyone she talks to.  He's sweet and reminds you of a wolf.  The boys push their bikes up and down the lane and in circles instead of riding them.  They did have motorized riding toys, but they got reposessed.  You didn't know those kinds of things could be reposessed.  You are studying English Literature at one of the closest state colleges to your hometown.  You just got married.  You are twenty.  You had been dating your husband for five years.  You both hated your off campus living situations and wanted to live together.  You both came from families who would look down on that.  It didn't much bother you, but you didn't want to disappoint your dad.  Your husband gets some school money from his parents and they helped you get emancipated for your financial aid, so you definitely didn't want to offend them.  So, one day, when he was helping you dye your hair burgundy, you asked him if he wanted to get married.  He said yes.  So you'd have an engagement ring, your sister talked a guy who was in love with her into buying one of the $99 diamonds at Wal-Mart.  You wore it long enough to show your parents.  Now, you have a nice little trailer all your own.  $178 payment every month.  But, it's yours and you can relax a little that there is no one.  No one.  No one you have to answer to anymore... but your husband.