Life can be harsh. Life can be short. Life can be long. Life can be painful. But you only get one life, so who really cares what you do with it? I mean, I little drinking here and there never hurt anyone. Smoke a little, you can't get lung cancer right away. Who would care if you got kicked out of your own house at fourteen? How about the fact that how you were forced to live at your friends' house since then? Who would care if you had sex when you were only fifteen years old? Or that you had an abortion at sixteen? At seventeen you had a child but put that one up for adoption. The father said he would help you take care of your precious little boy and you. But how about this little twist that I could have guess what was going to happen because nothing ever goes right for me? Two weeks before I was about to deliver my boyfriend gets drunk and dies in a car accident. Who cares about me now? People call you a slut, a whore, every bad name in the book.

Well, here I am, seventeen years old, living in New Jersey all by myself and starting my senior year in high school, nothing but a screw up. But hey, like they say, when it fells like you've hit rock bottom, there's only one way to go, up. This story is completely true. Everything stated here is true, and nothing is false information. If it is, then God will have to kill me now. My name is Jessica Parker and this is my story about how my life got turned upside-down.

THIRTEEN YEARS OLD

The life before thirteen was the same as most people who are younger. I had a fun life, as most people would say. At 2:55 A.M. on September 14th, 1987

was the happiest day of my moms life. She actually didn't want to call me Jessica. The only reason I was called Jessica was that she promised one of her friends when she was younger she would name her first girl Jessica. And even though my mom and her lost contact, she still kept her promise. I don't know if today I would be bale to keep a promise

Wow. So this is where it all starts, hmm? Well I could say thirteen was the worst age for me. Although, after that year, I started to fall deeper and deeper into that deep dark black hole that I couldn't get out of. It was like that hole kept getting larger and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get out of it. I was in the pass of no return after thirteen.

Age thirteen so many bad things happened to me I couldn't even start to explain, but I'll try. To make it short and put the details later, it happened like this. I started to smoke, I started to drink, my grades went down the pipe, I got my first boyfriend, I started to lose my best friends, and my life started to fall apart.

I blame this on me, not on anyone else. If I had just listened to my friends this all would have never happened. None of this would have happened and I would have been a happy thirteen year old with my only worry being how I did on that test, or how my friends were doing. But that didn't happen all as planned. I took another road. The bad road. This is how it started…

I was four feet and five inches tall and my boobs were just beginning to grow. I had 'the most amazing hair in the world' said the lady who always cut my hair. My hair was brown with some shades of red and it fell to about shoulder length. To make things even cooler I had just turned thirteen two days ago on September 16th 2000. Four years, damn, that long already? Well, I was thirteen years old when I first touched a cigarette. I never even knew how to spell cigarette or there were twenty in a pack. Hell, all I knew were my friends called them cancer sticks and As I walked into school I saw people smoking them.

Who would have known that you get addicted so fast? I mean, at first it was just 'Oh cool! I tried it a cigarette. Let's keep going on with my normal life. Big whoop, who cares? 'Yup, wrong move, not good, not good at all. Then from there, it got worse, and worse, until I was a full addict. Soon I was like, I'll just do it when I'm stressed. But I got stressed a lot, and the more I smoked the more I got addicted.

I never told my parents. But I'm guessing they found out, because when they confronted me, they didn't explode. I mean, sure, they did exploded on me, but something told me they knew about it. I'll bet you anything they smelt it on my clothes thinking back on this now. I was stupid when I was thirteen. I should have known that the younger you are, the faster you get addicted.

Let's start this from school. So there I was in school, waiting for the lunch bell to ring so I could smoke in the bathroom. Our school is shitty, and you can get away with almost anything in those bathrooms. Our school is huge. How huge space wise, there's just tons of kids in the school. From 6th grade to 12th grade, we have over 3,000 people in the school. Quick math tells me that's over 420 students in each grade. So here I am in the bathrooms smoking. And no I don't smoke one in there, I smoke two. Two cigarettes before school, two during lunch, two after school, and around eight to ten more between 3:30P.M. and 12:00 A.M. when I decided to go to bed.

I was pretty popular I guess. I had quite a few close friends that I could tell anything to. Then there were my other friends. My smoking friends. The friends I hang out with while I'm smoking before school, after school, and occasionally during lunch. They were real cool, because some were over eighteen and they could buy me cigarettes. I just had to pay them a little more than what they cost because they don't like giving change. I would give them a five for one pack. Five is much more than a cigarette pack costs back then in 2000.

Usually I gave them twenty, my weekly allowance, to buy four packs, and now trust me four packs don't last every long with twenty cigarettes in each pack, that's only eighty. By the time I was fourteen, I was smoking anywhere from fourteen to sixteen cigarettes in one day. That lasts me a little more than five days. So for almost two days I'm smokeless. But that's always Saturday and Sunday I have none. On those days I would just go over to my friends' house and borrow their cigarettes. They didn't smoke nearly as much as I did, but, during the weekend, and it was pretty weird.

My friends who didn't smoke were real concerned about me. They wanted me to try and quit because they were all saying "Dude, Jess, smoking fucks up your whole life…stop or you'll regret it in the future…What if your dad finds out, he'll flip out.". I didn't care. True smoking fucks up peoples lives but hey, I just said 'You only have one life so better live it to the fullest.' And my dad probably already found out, and he's waiting to catch me in the act. I'm not a dumb-ass dad. I may keep the stench on me, but I can lie and say my friends smokes and it got onto me. No big deal.

It was that year that my non-smoking friends started to hang out with me less and less until they just stopped and completely ignored me. I guess, thinking about it now, smoking really did fuck up my life. I lost my only true friends. My smoking friends weren't really my friends, just people I hung out with to smoke with. They were just random people to vent to, to get my stress lowered.