Sitting quietly at my stepfather's wake, I watched everyone weep over the death of my own personal demon. Crowded around the closed casket, they had no idea of the karma that laid him there. The broken steel cable that smashed his face in was God's retribution for the sins he had committed against a helpless child.

I stared on blankly as they worked up the courage to look inside and were devastated by what they saw. Mine were the only dry eyes in the room; my heart the only one not mourning.

I was closing in on the end of my fifth grade year when one afternoon I got off the school bus and walked inside the house to find my pregnant mother on the couch in complete dispair. As she told me how my stepfather had been in an accident at work and died, it took all of my strength not to smile in front of her. I ran to my room and buried my face in the pillow to hide my happiness that it was finally over. He would never touch me again.

As the second oldest of three children with a fourth on the way, I was also the most responsible and most well-behaved. I did as I was told; I respected authority and hated to get in trouble. Perhaps that was what made me such an easy target.

***

My parents divorced when I was really young. By the time I started school, my mother was doing her best to raise my older brother and I on her own. My father always did his best to be in our lives, regardless, and my mother dated a lot.

Then my mother met him, the man who would become my stepfather. I never really knew what to think of him. He was wild and angered easily. He was on an assortment of meds like Prozac and others. I was always afraid of him; I never knew what would set him off; and I never knew how to...