2
First of all, my name is Nicole Blackinton.
I'm fifteen years old and I was an orphan. My mother died in a car accident when I was five, and my father disappeared after that. Soon enough, I was brought to some orphanage in San Francisco. I lived there for a years until, one day, I was adopted. They were a couple with two younger girls. According to my step-aunt, they weren't my stepfather's.
Then, that brings me to him. My stepfather was a cripple. He was stuck in a wheelchair due to some kind of muscle disease. My stepmother…well, she wasn't exactly very fond of me. In some cases, I guess you could say she hated me. I always had that feeling when I wanted to scream in her face and ask her why she had agreed to adopt me in the first place.
But even though I really hated her, I loved my step-dad. He was always calm and collected. If it were the end of the world, he'd probably be reading a book.
His name was Tom. Just Tom. He had scraggly brown hair and a curly brown beard. His eyes never had a definite color when I looked at them. His smile was pearly white and warm. There was never a time when his smile didn't make me happy.
When I failed all my tests, he would smile and empathize with me.
My stepmother was the complete opposite. She hit me when I didn't get good grades. She didn't care about my dyslexia. She treated me like I was like everyone else. Usually, this would have been good except that she didn't bother even getting me those tutors that train the dyslexic to read and write properly. Her name was Marissa and she had limp, dirty-blond hair. It hung over her face like a dead broom. She was as thin as a toothpick and was at least six feet tall.
Sometimes I wondered if she was even human.
Though I hated my stepmother, I didn't hate her children. They were both younger than me. Lisa was ten and Macy was eleven. Even though we always fought, it was nice knowing you had sisters, even if you're not related at all.
Lisa and Macy are half-sisters. Marissa hooked up with two different men in college and they were the result. Honestly, I wasn't surprised that Marissa had been that stupid. I was just surprised that those two guys would want to have sex with her.
See, my life wasn't perfect. Sometimes, in those special moments when Tom would smile at me, or sneak out to get us some Starbucks, or when Lisa, Macy and I didn't fight, and when Marissa was asleep, everything seemed like it was the closest I would get to a perfect life. Plus, Marissa and Tom were getting a divorce.
The problem was that Will had to ruin it for me.
"Will" had to go crash that party and drag me to camp.