My 18th birthday was the first one in my life I ever remember looking forward to. Mrs Weaver, the evil woman who ran the foster home I grew up in, never bothered to celebrate anyone's birthday, and god forbid you even mention it around her. Previous birthdays had been sad at best – I knew that other kids got parties and presents, and that people made a fuss of them, but I got none of that. All I got was shouted at and sometimes beaten for even daring to say the word 'birthday'. The worst was my thirteenth, when the kids in my class at school got me a little jewellery box and filled it with little bits of paper on which they'd written what they liked about me. They all knew how crappy my life was, knew I was depressed and had fuck all self-esteem, and they genuinely wanted to make it better for me, it was incredible… I'd never known that sort of kindness. But my happiness was short-lived; Mrs Weaver got so angry about me having any sort of gift, and when she saw it that evening that she threw it and smashed it, then came at me, pinning me against the wall by my throat until I passed out. I had to wear a shirt with a collar on it at school for a week to hide her finger marks.

So yeah, birthdays in my foster home were nothing to get excited about. But turning eighteen, that was something I couldn't wait for – that was the age at which I could, with permission, start to live away from the home. I didn't have that permission, and I probably wouldn't have the slightest hope of getting her to agree, but if I could escape before she knew what was happening, then I'd have the upper hand. Once I was out of the hell that was her home, she wouldn't be able to intimidate me into staying, and if she wanted me back, she would have to find me first and then call the cops on me. And I'm fairly sure she wouldn't have liked the attention that would bring.

I had to be incredibly careful with my preparations. I'd heard stories – apparently another kid tried to leave on his eighteenth, just like I was doing, and Mrs Weaver had barged into this boy's room the night before to find him packing a suitcase. I only got this third-hand from another kid when I was about 12, so it could have been completely made up, but supposedly she threw him down the stairs and almost killed him, and I can absolutely believe she'd do that. Not wanting to suffer a similar fate, I did nothing until the early hours of my birthday when everyone else was asleep. Packing everything you own into a couple of battered holdalls and a stupid backpack with an anime logo on when you're terrified of making any noise lest you wake up the child abuser sleeping two doors down is not an experience that I would recommend to anyone. I was scared shitless the entire time.

At least I knew where I was going. There was this older girl who lived on the estate nearby, Lonnie, and she was an absolute saviour, at least to me. I had no doubt she wasn't entirely an angel – she sold drugs for some gang, but that meant she had enough money to get her own place, and when I mentioned that I wanted to move out, she offered right away for me to stay with her. I was going to pay my way by doing some work for her – running drugs, I imagined, but doing something like that really didn't give me any problems. I wasn't exactly a 'good girl', I'd mostly bunked off school for the last couple of years, and my Saturday afternoon entertainment was walking up to the motorway bridge with Lonnie and chucking stones at cars. Selling a couple of illicit substances to people definitely wasn't going to keep me up at night.

I left before Weaver got up, I think it must have been about 5am. The world at that time was weird; the sun hadn't yet risen, although the light peeking over the horizon gave the sky a slight glow, and the streets I walked along were practically deserted. Occasionally a car would pass, some early riser off to work or something, and I passed a couple of dog walkers. It was eerily peaceful, but it was nice – in a way it served to underscore my new-found freedom, this new world of peace and safety. I had done it, I had survived almost two decades of abuse, and now the world would find out who Catra really was. Who I could be now I was in an environment that welcomed me and would let me spread my wings.

Lonnie's place seemed so much further away when I was carrying my entire life with me. The few times I'd been there before, it took about 15 minutes to walk there from what I guess had now become my former home. I'm certain that it took at least twice that this time, not that I really minded; it was amazing just being able to walk through the streets knowing that I never had to go back to that… I rarely use this word, but I can't think of any better description – that cunt of a foster carer. Every tiny corner of my life before now had been miserable, but at last I had a future. And she wouldn't be part of it.

Although I'd sent Lonnie a text the night before to warn her that I'd be arriving pretty early, I don't think she remembered, judging by the six times I had to press the buzzer for her apartment before I received a groggy "Yeah?" through the speaker. Clearly, I'd woken her up, but what else could I have done? I wasn't going to spend a couple of hours walking around carrying two heavy bags while I waited for her to have a nap – I could handle myself in a fight, sure, but this estate was not the nicest place in town. And when I say 'not the nicest', I mean 'they found a dead body in the kid's playground the other day' level of shittiness. That kind of area.

Her apartment was on the second floor of this godawful 70s council block, the sort of place that had been built on the cheap and had seen little maintenance since then beyond painting over graffiti, and it seemed they'd even given up on that years ago. The only two fluorescent lights that still worked flickered like strobe lights, and the main front door was more boarded-up holes than door by now. I guess people really liked kicking the shit out of it. It was hardly the place one dreams of as a first home, but I'd learnt the hard way that dreams were not something worth having.

"Fuck, Catra… it's, like, 6am," Lonnie was half-asleep leaning on the doorway as I climbed the final few stairs. Given the mismatched combination of bra and rather revealing panties, she was either extremely unashamed about her body or lacking in the consciousness needed to take any action to protect her modesty. My guess was the latter.

I felt a little bad for having forced her out of bed at this time, but it wasn't like I had much choice, "I did tell you I had to get out of there early. If Mrs Weaver caught me…"

"She'd beat the living shit out of you, yeah."

"Exactly."

Eyes still shut, as though trying to hold onto sleep for as long as possible, Lonnie shuffled off to the side to make room for me, "Come in. Sorry it's a mess."

Though I didn't have the luxury of judgement, I was still slightly taken aback by how much of an understatement that was. I'd been here a couple of times before, but it had never looked this bad – I guess she must have put in the effort for me on those occasions. The bare-floored hallway I stepped through had a sporadic carpet of unopened letters strewn across it, some acting as a mat for several pairs of shoes that had seen better days. I dumped my bags onto the floor next to them, giving a relieved sigh now the weight was no longer pressing on my shoulders, and continued through the apartment. The living room was in even more of a state than the hall, the bare windows sending a shaft of early dawn sunlight onto a dining table piled high with unironed clothes and myriad wires attached to bits of home appliances in various states of disrepair. In the centre of the room, a ratty blue sofa was covered in empty beer bottles and ashtrays, and this had seemingly been enough to convince a blonde-haired houseguest to sleep on the floor next to it instead.

"Just kick him out the way," Lonnie explained, doing exactly that to the comatose man who stirred slightly but remained fast asleep, "Move, Kyle, ya fuckin' weapon."

So this was the famous Kyle. Lonnie had often talked about him, though I'd yet to meet him, and he seemed like a bit of a scapegoat for her little circle of friends. From the stories I'd heard, he was always the one who ended up the butt of jokes, the one who they forced out to get shopping at all hours of the night or pick up the tab at the bar, but there was clearly something about him that made him worth having around. I assumed he was part of the gang too, so maybe she didn't have a choice, but from what I could gather of the snippets she'd told me about him, he often stayed here with her.

Lonnie must have caught me staring a little too long, "You wanna fuck him or something? Trust me, it ain't nothing special but it's a dick… still better than getting yourself off. Probably wanna wait 'til he's sober though, the beer really gets to him. It's like a fucking marshmallow."

"Oh, no, no…" I spluttered nervously, trying to purge that image from my mind and starting to wonder exactly what sort of relationship these two really had, "I… uh, I'm gay anyway."

"Nice…" she drawled, running a hand down my back somewhat suggestively before clapping her hands together and becoming rather more forcefully cheerful than she had been a few minutes before, "Right, I'm gonna make coffee. Fuck knows I need some caffeine if I'm gonna be up at this time of the morning. Make yourself at home, Catra."

With Lonnie off in the kitchen, having found a dressing gown to wrap herself in from a hanger on the back of a door, I had a couple of minutes of peace to collect my thoughts. It had only just started to dawn on me what a major turning point in my life this day had already been for me. I didn't have to live in fear anymore, I didn't have to be so guarded every moment I was here, and it was such an unknown feeling that I couldn't put any words to it – was this what safety felt like? In the foster home, my mind was always surveying every inch around me, always second-guessing my actions based on how Mrs Weaver would see them. I knew how she thought by now, she was obsessed with what people would think of her based on what I did – that was largely down to her not wanting me to do or say anything that might alert people to take a closer look at the way she ran the home. But at Lonnie's, my new home, I didn't have to worry about that. I could do whatever I wanted, and she wouldn't thunder into my bedroom armed with whatever her weapon of the day was. I was overwhelmed with freedom.

Wait, that was a point. Where was my bedroom? It was a tiny flat and I could only see three doors off the main hallway. There was the sofa, but it seemed like Kyle had more of a claim to that than I did. I poked my head around the kitchen doorway where Lonnie was pouring out two mugs of coffee in the small gap she'd cleared amongst the dirty mugs and used teabags on the worktop, "Hey, uh, where am I sleeping?"

I silently cursed myself for not asking what should have been a really obvious question the moment Lonnie offered me a place to stay, nor at any point in the few weeks since she had suggested it. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't want to hear anything that might put me off staying, maybe I was just so intoxicated by the idea of being free – whatever it was, it was rather too late to start worrying about it. Rather unsurprisingly, I heard Mrs Weaver's voice in my brain start berating me: You never think, do you, Catra? You are a useless little girl, I've half a mind to lock you in your room so you can't inconvenience anyone else. I guess it would be quite a while before she got out of my head for good.

"I was gonna say in with me," Lonnie casually stirred the mugs, reaching into the fridge beside her and pulling out a plastic bottle of milk. She glanced at the label, then at her watch, before deciding to give it a sniff test before using it. From the look on her face, it was clearly on the unusable side, and she silently put the cap back on before throwing it carefully into the near-overflowing bin in the corner, "Fuck, ugh. Hope you don't mind it black."

"Yeah, black's fine."

Lonnie handed me one of the coffees and led me back into the living room, where Kyle's snoring had increased in volume from barely audible to a level not dissimilar to a truck engine. She gave him a rather painful-looking kick, which seemed to be pretty effective in quietening him down again, and cleared a space on the sofa for us both, a couple of beer bottles clanking onto the floor, "I mean, I don't really have a lot of space, but it's just for a bit right? Kyle usually takes the sofa, so my bed's really all that's left."

It wasn't quite what I had expected, but what choice did I have? If I didn't sleep here, I'd be out on the streets because no fucking way was I ever setting foot under that woman's roof again. Besides, I wasn't exactly too disappointed to be sharing a bed with someone like Lonnie now I was an adult - something wonderful could come from that.

"Relax, Catra," she must have seen the concern in my expression, despite my best attempts at hiding it, "I'm not gonna try anything weird, you're barely legal. Fuck, give me some credit, we're just gonna top and tail."

I shook my head, "No, no, it's fine. I just… I didn't really think about what the arrangements would be and it's… it's fine."

"Oh my God, shit," Lonnie's hand flew up to cover her gaping mouth, "She didn't…she didn't touch you, did she? Is that why you're worried? I… it's okay, I'll figure something out, I had no-"

"God, no! Weaver might have been human trash who broke my arm a couple of times and beat me most weeks, but she wasn't a nonce. I'd have probably gotten her arrested a long time ago if she tried anything like that."

It felt strange defending that woman, but I had an odd sense of responsibility in doing so, and I hated it. Why should I say anything nice about her when she never had anything nice to say about me? I could have told Lonnie anything, come up with some really nasty shit and she would have deserved every single thing I said, even if it was a lie. Maybe that was it, though; maybe the things she did were horrifying enough without needing to make anything up. Not that Lonnie probably cared, and nor did I really want to spend my first hour in my new home pouring my heart out to a drug dealer about my abusive childhood. She already knew enough about it anyway.

"That's something, I guess," she responded with the tone of someone who was already finding the conversation really fucking awkward and had no idea what to say. I'm sure she'd heard it all before anyway. I rarely got to talk about what my life in that foster home was like; I knew that if I confided in anyone about what Mrs Weaver was doing, they would call social services and she would flat up deny it and claim I was making things up to deliberately hurt her. After all, Catra is the naughty kid, Catra has problems, Catra would say any old thing for attention, Catra has always hated me when I've done nothing but give her kindness. All that bullshit. And once the social workers had stopped sniffing around, once they'd had their 'private' conversation with me that she always made sure we knew she was listening in on, that was when she'd come for me. That was when she would punish me for 'lying' about her. So I had learned never to say anything about her to anyone who might make the misguided decision to 'help' me.

Lonnie was different though. It wasn't that she didn't care, I knew she did – that was why she was doing this – but she had a similar view of the authorities to me: they only existed to protect those like them. She'd never revealed much about her history, but I got the sense that she'd had a lot of crappy family stuff happen and been thrown about in the system with no-one ever really helping her. At least she knew a little about her parents though, even if they were, in her own words, 'a fucking alky and a dickhead scally who spunked and ran'. I had no idea about mine, but in all honesty, I expected them to be roughly the same.

"Lonnie?" I knew this was going to sound horribly cheesy, but I needed to let her know how grateful I was, "Thank you. Really, thank you."

"Sure, babe," she sipped her coffee, shuddering at the bitterness. The snoring coming from the sleeping man on the floor reached another crescendo, and I could see her gearing up to forcibly shut him up again. Before she could, however, she played the gracious host and invited me to do so instead.

Though I was sat down, I gave my foot as much force as I could and connected with the small of his back, "Shut the fuck up, Kyle!"

She met my expectant smile with a validating grin, "Yeah, you're gonna fit in just fine here."