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I reflected back on ra for theenvelopes on the weekends in our living room My mother had always been withdrawn, unhappy with the life she chose for herself

Most of the time it was just dad and me He folded the flyers and I licked the envelopes We were an a team

We were happy for a time

It was only when he started in politics when he started to withdraw fro hi a family of one with the help of my best friends

Tanner and Nikki

Looking back on my childhood I still couldn’t pinpoint when the switch had been flipped, and the Tanner I knew turned into the monster he became

Though his poor parents, with the help of a counselor, seenosis It was common for patients who had come so close to death themselves to develop a sort of morbid curiosity about death It was also common to develop mood disorders, violent tendencies, and compulsive obsessions

Tanner developed all those things To the extreme

The shock of it all ca it

The leuke point, the fork in the road to the land of no return for Tanner, but I knew he’d started abusing Nikki as early as age ten In hindsight, there were signs Signs no kid would have ever picked up on

But that fact didn’t change that I did have guilt Soa ton of bricks on my back

Nikki had always been happy and outgoing She was bossy, confident, and a bit of a tattle-tale It all changed very slowly Over the course of eight years, the Nikki I knely slipped away and was replaced by the Nikki who needed drugs to cope with the abuse

One day Nikki was pointing her finger in Tanner’s face, calling hia spaces with his little racecar, advancing nine spots instead of the seven he rolled

The next, Nikki was staring at the board blankly, shrugging her shoulders when I asked her if Tanner was cheating

And although Tanner turned out to be a rieve for the boy he used to be One ofby my side I decided that the Tanner who did all of the horrible things he did, wasn’t worth the effort of reht of my childhood and my best friends, every time evil Tanner started to creep into ain