Home, Sweet home.
Screen-door slamming, he couldn't get away from them fast enough.
Becky remembered her mother's voice, scared and pleading, as Rainy slammed the door shut behind him. "Your daughter'll need you, Rainy."
Her mother was a goner. She was a fool for that man, even though he hit her. Even though he hit her Becky, she just didn't care. She was scared without a man.
Rainy had thrown his travel case into the backseat of the Buick and ignored his wife's pleads as he drove away, leaving her lying there on her knees crying her stupid heart out.
This time there had been no tears streaming down Becky's face. There had been no reason to stay there. Rainy wound be back in a week, when he had slept with every woman in town. And then the hitting would start again.
She didn't even think her mother would miss her. Meredith was selfish enough to let Rainy hit Becky, ignoring the bruises on her jaws, blocking out the screaming, as long as she knew that Rainy was with her. No Becky wouldn't miss her father the least, but she surely wouldn't miss the wreck of a woman who called herself a mother.
She had hitchhiked all the way to Chicago, mostly with truckers, sometimes with a family travelling, once with a drunken sonuvabitch, who had crashed the car into a tree and nearly got Becky sent to a home for runaways.
She kicked the officer in the balls, took a bite of his arm and made a run for it, hiding in some empty docking port. That was how she had met Mac, a runaway her own age. She had been the one who cut Becky's long, blond hair off, telling her that no girl should be out on her own, especially one as pretty as Becky.
"You'll need a new name, honey." She declared, pulling a dirty, ragged hat over Becky's once golden hair. "Something male."
"Mark?" Becky suggested. Mac shook her head.
"Too sissy. You'll need somethin' masculine. Like Frank."
"Frank?"
"Don't like Frank? Humm… How 'bout Jack?"
"Jack." She had tasted the name, and she liked it right away.
"Yeah, I think Jack's a good name for you. It'll get you places. People named Jack is the kinda people who go places. Who does stuff with their lives. You're without a doubt a Jack."
"Glad you were the one to give it to me." Jack said content. And as the sun had set on that day, Mac and Jack cuddled up in the backroom of a shut-down restaurant.
As the pale morning sun hit the windows and was reflected onto the cold concreted floor jack woke, only to find that Mac was gone. A few blocks away the police dragged a young girl, who had overdosed, out of a dumpster, as Jack looked on, a sickening feeling rising in her stomach. But her stomach was empty and jack only gagged a few times before the tears came. And then, suddenly, there were no more tears. There were just emptiness and the knowledge that she was all alone in the universe.
She jumped aboard the first ship leaving for the stars, and she travelled, sometimes as a blind passenger, stowed away in the luggage trunk, other times she'd steel money and by her way aboard, forgetting her past and her misery as cyro-sleep dozed her nerves and clouded her brain.
I will not make the same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself cause my heart so much misery
I will not break the way you did, you fell so hard
I've learned the hard way to never let it get that far.
(Kelly Clarkson – "Because of You")