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Hope? What good is hope anyway? Hope implies perspective, implies the ability to look forward and want or expect something better, something different and good. All hope had ever gotten her was more trouble, more hurt. Expectations of something better only led to disappointment. She hoped her father and mother wanted her but every time she ever looked to them they chastised her or ignored her. She was sure, after time, that that was all she would ever get from them.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him while he slept and then looked back to the floor and remembered when she was 9 years old and was in the garage of the home in Kentucky. She had been jumping rope when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye moving alongside the wall and behind the boxes. She put the rope down (she could remember it clear as day) and walked over to the boxes and moved them slowly. It was unreal, unbelievable almost, what she saw. She ran into the house and in the kitchen her mother was washing dishes. When she told her mother she’d found a snake in the garage behind the boxes her mother turned from the sink, slapped her across the face, and called her a liar. It wasn’t until her father came home later and found her in her room crying that the snake was found and killed. Her father just looked at her mother and then went to the cabinet to fix himself a drink. When she didn’t come to the dinner table her father told her mother to go talk to her.

“What good would that do, she only listens to you anyways,” her mother said and leered at him as though she and her father enjoyed some secret bond that no one else in the world was ever privy to and that she couldn’t help but hate.

“I’m just living for today,” she said to herself when she turned sixteen. Just then all she knew was that that night she was going to be with friends who, if they knew her, liked her anyways because at least she was entertaining. Nobody could ignore her when she was laughing, that was one thing she was keenly aware of. So she put on her laugh as though it were part of an elaborate costume and broke out the liquor and told her friends to roll a joint. She was going to get fucked up that night and at least for the time she wouldn’t have to think, not about tomorrow anyways. One year later her parents went out of town and her sister came home to find her lying on the bathroom floor vomiting out the side of her mouth. Too many pills on purpose and you go to sleep, she’d heard, only she hadn’t calculated that her sister would come home early and find her. “What a bunch of dumbasses,” she thought, “now you find me?” when she woke up in the hospital.