• Prologue

    “Daddy? Is that a gun? Why do you have that? Aren’t those dangerous?” Her father smiles and ruffles her hair as she stands beside him, confused. The edges of this memory are tinged with gold.
    “ I have a gun just in case I need to defend you, or your mother, or your brother. Just in case something bad happens. But can I ask you to do something for me?”
    “Yep!” She is seven years old, and this exclamation makes her father laugh. But soon the smile fades from his lips and his expression becomes sincere.
    “Do not play with this gun, Penny. Please. Do not play with it.”
    “Okay Daddy!” At this point, her brother comes in and lifts the seven year old up.
    “You’ve gotten heavy, little one. Better lay off the Twinkies,” he teases. “You wanna go to the park, Penny?”
    “Yep! Lets go to the park, Big Brother!”
    At this point, the father interrupts. “Watch out for her, son. We don’t want her falling off the swings now, do we?” He gives a grin and a wink and leaves the room. The Brother and Penny follow suit, taking the stairs two at a time to get downstairs. Their mother is in the Kitchen, cooking dinner for that night.
    “Brandon? Penny? You going to the park?” Brandon carries his little sister into the kitchen to nod at his mother. “ Well, be back before dark. You should have a few hours.”
    The siblings leave.
    Chapter One

    2004-fifth grade: “Hehe, its funny when it cries”
    2005-sixth grade: “Shut up, freak”
    2008-ninth grade: “What are you gonna do about it?”
    2009-tenth grade, current: “Yo! No one likes you! Why don’t you just do us all a favor and kill yourself?”

    These were the taunts I grew up with. See, I was the type of person who everyone loves to hate. I was the one who was homeschooled ‘till fifth grade, when my brother died, I was the one who had glasses, braces, and the ugliest, frizziest brown hair you’ve ever seen. The one with no friends, bad fashion, too skinny for words, yet still not anorexic, and who’d never been on a date in her life. I’d probably been called every bad name known to man before I turned thirteen. All my life, I’d lived with being made fun of, a favorite subject of rumors, the one everyone insults of to make themselves feel better. And it hadn’t stopped at taunting. Some of them even took it so far as to beat me up after school. I was littered with scars and bruises constantly. For sixteen long years, I just endured this, taking every blow as if it were a bullet, listening to their goading as it got worse and worse.
    And then I snapped.