She used to have a normal childhood. She could remember that dad left for work real early, long before she had to get up for school. Mom would come in later, hair still wet from her shower, dressed for work in a business suit but with no make-up on. Her face was softer then. She would sit at the edge of her bed and her weight would sink the mattress down. Her hand was always cool and dry on her forehead. It was a better time then, a happier time to her child's mind who didn't hear the arguments at first. Her parents loved her then. She couldn't help but wonder when they stopped loving her, when everything changed.
Maybe if she was still as she used to be as a child, sugar, spice, and everything nice she could have fit in with the X-Men. Even now Tabitha knew they would accept her, but she would never fit in there. Too much had happened to her and she was no longer anything like that child. It had been years since they last saw her. She had just up and left one day and hadn't come back since. She just assumed that she was more like her father than she had even wanted to admit. But she had learned to stop fighting her fate.
Dad left one day. No warning, no goodbye. Tabitha had walked home from school that day in third grade, her pink Barbie backpack on her shoulders. She came home just in time to see dad squeal out of the driveway. She could tell there was something different this time. Her parents hadn't just gotten into one of their everyday fights and he left. No, she saw the suitcases in the car, saw her mother standing on the front step, mascara running and a white knuckled fist pressed against pale, trembling lips. He stepped on the gas and swung around the corner out of sight. Mom fell to her knees sobbing heart retching cries.
Tabitha dropped her backpack to the slushy sidewalk with its yellow snow and tromped through the snow to an already made snow angel. She fell back into the hard packed snow. She wondered if snow angels were like real angels and if they would ever come to take her away. She exhaled in a cloud of white smoke.
The first time she got caught, mind, not the first time she had done it, the security guards came up from behind her and snatched her backpack (dark blue this time) off her thin shoulders and forced her to turn out her pockets right there in the mall entrance of Strawberry's with curious shoppers looking on, her face burned into their retinas as a thief. A CD out of her pocket, two more from her backpack and three DVD's. You would think someone like Tabitha who frequented electronic stores for her games of See-If-I-Can would have learned beforehand of the new security measures, metal bars in the cases. Though she got caught, she learned a new lesson and rule for her game.
Her mother came into the holding room in the back looking angry and ashamed. She clutched her purse closer to her thin chest. She managed to talk to store manager out of pressing charges and led her daughter to the car. She yelled.
"What stupid thing were you thinking?", "Do you think this is cute?", "Are you trying to punish me for something?" She asked, tears welling up in her blue eyes that were so much like Tabitha's own. Tabitha stared at her with no expression in her eyes. That scared her mother more than anything Tabitha had done to this point, that look in her ten year olds eyes. Her daughter was only in fifth grade for Pete's sake, she shouldn't be going this stuff until she's 16, from the pressure of her friends.
"Marty, I don't know what to do." Tabitha listened from the other side of the doorway as her mother talked to Marty.
"Why can't you take her?" Her mother paused, listening to the reply.
"For Fuck's sake Marty, she's your damn kid to in case you've forgotten. You don't pay any child support, do you want me to sure you for back payments? The least you can do is take her for a bit to straighten her out."
Tabitha slunk away, not wanting to hear more. She thought she was safe, the shoplifting incident hadn't been brought up all week. Like it was going to turn into a distant, vague memory. And now she was going behind her back to ship her off to Marty and his new wife, her father that she hadn't even heard from for the part two years, not even a birthday card. Bitch.
Tabitha walked down the hall of their one level house to her bedroom. Her bedroom was in a stage of transfer. The light powder pink walls were covered with posters of The Sex Pistols and Nirvana. A large stereo was the main feature of the room. But Tabitha knew that the real main feature, something volatile. If her mother ever found out her ass would be grass. A big switchblade she had lifted from a boy at school.
She had seen some girl on the lifetime channel doing it once when her mom was working one night. She tried it once and found that she liked it, that it really did help.
Her mother never saw what looked like deep paper cuts on her daughter's legs as she sent her on the plane.
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