She had always been the quite, back of the classroom sort of girl. Too tired, or angry, or scared to speak. There were days, even weeks when the only reason she came to school was to escape the pain of staying home.

    By all standards she should have been made a ward of the state long before the apocalypse ever plagued the streets of the city. Her mother hadn’t really been ’there’ for most of her life. Physically she was present, but always intoxicated in one way or another. She went through her phases, each one making it impossible for her to keep a job: alcohol, heroine, cocaine, her most recent was methamphetamine. For the most part she was a pretty women, she would go out each night, high as a kite, and find herself a man to pay her bills. She would return payment between the sheets…when she was sober enough to get between them. As for a father figure in her life, good luck finding him. With as many people as her mother had slept with, even she didn’t know who had fathered her only child. 

    Her mother also tended to be selectively blind, ignoring events she did not want to see or believe. She was generally too cracked out, or flying too high to please her ever changing boyfriends. “Who better to repay the rent money than the useless jail bait sitting in my house?” One of them had said in a drunken argument. Her mother had used the rent money she had somehow earned herself to buy her next fix. In this area, the supply was low and the demand for the drug was high, so the prices were monopolized by one person. A months rent worth of meth only lasted two days for her mother.

    Donald was her latest flavor of the street. He had found her in a bar a few blocks down, and felt sorry for her when she explained that they would soon loose their house, and she had a 17 year old daughter to worry about. In hindsight, she wondered if it was pity, or a predator instinct that drew him to her. He was the worst of all the filthy dicks her mother had brought home. Each night after her mother had passed out, he would find her, and have his way. His excuse was that he was only collecting rent. He was the man of house, the only one holding a job, and so he could do what he wanted with his property, and until she got a job or moved out, she was his property. Her mother didn’t believe it, and blew her off, and she didn’t trust police.