I am a girl. And I won't lie about it, most of the time I feel like a boy…a boy with boobs… But that's not the point, the point is all my friends are guys and they expect me to go and skip school to go joyriding cars, get drunk, smoke. I mean, it was okay when we were younger, I enjoyed being a "tom-boy", I liked wrestling them to the ground, climbing trees, being wild and free and having nothing to care about. But things…things were different now.

It happened when I was sixteen, we all were. And every time I wore a skirt or a dress, did my hair or put on make-up (which was rare), the guys would go all weird, and be degrading towards me, tell me to 'stop fooling around.' Verno was the only one who didn't treat me like someone else, although I didn't appreciate how often he'd say: "Gee, Debbie, you look really swell today." Teddy teased him about having a crush on me (he also took the liberty to tease me to); I chose to ignore all of them, especially Teddy.

Teddy was like a brother to me, we'd lived on the same street all our lives, we'd both loved our fathers, and we'd both lost them too. Everybody knew about Teddy's dad, and everybody knew about mine. My dad was always at work, ever since I could remember he was always working, he was kind towards me and my mother and always brought us gifts when he'd come back from long business trips.

When I was nine, things started to go bad, my mother would argue with my father about money, and that how was he working so much and we were still poor. My father stormed out, and my mother got a job waitressing in one of the stingiest of bars, I was alone at home for two weeks until my father came home one night. My mother had fallen asleep on our passed-down couch, the liqueur she had absorbed had finally overwhelmed her, and I'd had some peace to study at last. My father ignored me as he came in through the front door, I'd ran to greet him but he pushed past me. I was confused but continued to follow him as he went upstairs into the bedroom, pulled out a suitcase and started to throw his belongings into it. I started to cry and asked him where he was going, if it was another business trip. For the fifteen minutes he had come home, he had shown no emotion, and when he went back through the door, my mother awoke, and I followed him out into the rain, crying, begging him to talk to me. I grabbed onto his leg, he pushed me off, got into his car and drove off. I ran as fast as I could.

I woke up the next in bed, I'd caught a fever, the doctor was sat next to my bed, telling my mother I needed to have at least two weeks bed-rest before going outside. In those two weeks, not only did I begin to hate my father, but my mother as well, and when you're an only child, it can create a miserable childhood.

From that day I became bitter, and none of the girls in school would go near me, they had their 'precious happy lives' to lead, while I rotted in my own hell with my whore of a mother. Things got worse in high school, I was bullied by the populars and the hoods, they looked down on me and labeled me as 'the misery chick'. I took refuge with Teddy and his friends in their tree house, they knew what it was like to be bullied and even though they were reluctant for me to be part of their gang at first, Teddy persisted that 'I was okay for a girl' and eventually they let me hang out with them.

I remember once when we were thirteen, I'd noticed I was changing in the female departments, my mother had never warned me about puberty and school didn't talk about that kind of thing, so when I woke up to the site of blood between my sheets I was terrified. I began to cry and screamed for my mother, she came into my room looked at me and the bed and walked back out. She came back in a few minutes and threw a pack of sanitary towels at me, then she left again. When I'd finally stopped cry half an hour later, it was time to go to school, I got ready and walked there quickly, taking the shortcut through the field. I felt myself burn for hatred of my mother as I got onto school grounds, I knew that there were physical changes like growing taller, boobs and hips and hair, from the other girls conversations I had managed to hear in the toilets. But this. This was something else. I vowed to myself at that moment that when I returned home that night it would be my last time there.

That night, I packed up all my money, some food and clothes and left the house, my mother was sat in the kitchen when I did. I was thirteen and it was twelve o'clock at night, she didn't say anything, my own mother let me walk out of that door. I shut the door behind me and felt like this was the beginning of an adventure, I didn't know where I should go, I had no family, I'd never even left Castle Rock. But the night was cool and crisp and my questions melted away as I began to walk in the direction of the tree house, as I did I remembered the time the guys had gone to find Ray Browers body without me. When Verno told us, they suggested I shouldn't go because I was a girl, Chris stuck up for me for a few minutes, but only because I'd managed to distract his older brother Eyeball the week before, while Chris avoided a beating. I was going to go with them whether they liked it or not, follow them if I had to, but that morning my mother's current fancy man didn't approve of my 'sassy behavior' and beat me till I was unconscious. My mother of course, did nothing.

I reached the tree house and left a prepared note for them, saying that I was okay and just had to get away from Castle Rock, I asked them not to say anything to anybody about the note. And with that, I left for the train station.

The police found me three weeks later, just five miles away from the Maine borderline. It wasn't till I got back that I discovered from Teddy that it wasn't my mother who had put out the search for me, it was the school when they'd noticed my absence for a few days. My mother did her part though, she played the role of good mother when I returned for the town's sake, but everything was back to normal within a week.

The guys asked me constantly about what had happened in those three weeks, and no matter how persuasive they tried to be (Verno even offered me his jar of pennies, that is, when he found it) I never told them. The four of them had noticed a change in me, an awareness I suppose and my boobs, for a whole month it was the only thing they looked at while I was speaking. I came to the conclusion that I despised them, and instead of wearing a bra like all the other girls, I used bandage tape to tape them down. I didn't grow outwards much more; I was always running about with the guys and my narrow body stayed narrow, a slight hint of hips and taped down boobs. I was as tall as Chris, which meant I was taller than the others, that was until the next year when they had their growth spurts and I became the shortest.

I was just above average height for a girl at 5'8, and the lack of meat on my bones meant I had another reason to be teased for at school. The boys however turned my body shape into a positive thing and nicknamed me 'Sparrow' for my twig like legs, scattered personality and ability to hum unconsciously like a bird. At fifteen, me and the boys had begun to ignore what the school called its 'social norm' and did what we liked. We skipped classes, joyrided cars, climbed trees, smoked and got drunk, we even crashed a few parties. We then began to be noticed, we were known by the other kids in school, but not enough to be popular, and we weren't bullies, so we weren't the 'new hoods'. To everyone else we were five different people who should be in different social groups, we became labeled as freaks because of this 'scary individuality' from not conforming. We didn't care.

It was the night of my sixteenth birthday and the five of us laid out in the field near our tree house. We were drunk. Very drunk. And as Teddy and Verno were play-wrestling over God knows what, I took a drag of my cigarette and looked into the night sky.

I am sixteen. My only friends are boys. I hate my mother. I am abused at least once a week by someone. My grades are bad and my manners even worse. I tape down my boobs. I am seen as a rebel. I am Deborah Harris. The Sparrow.