Inglewood, California, 1990
She stood in the doorway of her parents' bedroom, and smelled the sour odor of drunken breath. Her mother lay across the bed, unconscious, leaving no room for her father. Nikki felt her body tremble in places it had only just begun to tremble. From the living room, she heard the TV. A happy family with three kids and a dog, a clean house and a sober mother was making the audience laugh.
She crossed the hall to the bathroom. She was thirteen now, and had just started remembering to brush her teeth at night, even when her mother wasn't "well" enough to remind her. She looked into the mirror. She was a pretty girl, she thought. She wasn't incredibly popular because she didn't have expensive clothes and her parents didn't drive a cool car, but she was pretty. She took a few steps back and saw more of her body. She was pretty and, yes, she was sexy. Or at least she would be when she grew up.
She went to her bedroom and closed the door. She changed into pink boxer shorts and a white T-shirt and left her clothes in a pile inside her closet. She switched off the light. Her bed was against one wall, under the window. She pulled back the covers and lay down.
Her early childhood swirled around in her memory as she looked at the sky. "Twinkle, twinkle little star..." Had someone really sung that to her, or had she only imagined it? She heard the door open, slowly, and heard him walk across the rug. As he sat down on the bed, she allowed her imagination to outshine reality. There really were stars up there, somewhere, and there really was a Hollywood. He pulled down the covers. As he began to rub his hands over her body, she thought about Jason Peters, this boy she liked at school. She immediately forced the image from her mind. She couldn't think about him while her father did this to her. He pulled up her shirt, and she pressed one hand against the cold windowpane.
She hadn't been born into this human body...she was something else instead. Something magic...something that glowed in the night sky. A star, a diamond...she was! Just because people said that the fake world was real and the real world was fake didn't make it so. She knew where she belonged, and it wasn't in this bed with this man. It was there, in heaven.