Page 1 of Collide

Prologue

RememberintheDisneycartoon,Aladdin,where Aladdin steals the bread and gets chased by a bunch of fat fuckers, only to end up giving that loaf of bread to two homeless kids?

And that little shit, Abu, takes a chunk out of his half before he feels guilty and hands over his share. And then just after, Aladdin finds a genie, makes a wish, falls in love….yada yada yada.

Did you ever stop to wonder what happened to those two little kids?

You know the ones I mean, the little girl who is rifling through a bin trying to find food for her and her brother? Everyone feels sorry for Aladdin, the poor homeless boy who pretends to be a prince to get the girl to fall in love with him, but no one gave a fuck about what happened to those two little kids, so long as Aladdin got the princess.

Well, you know what?

It’s total bullshit.

Disney has got a lot to answer for, they churn out stories about poor little boys and girls who go through some shitty event in their life only to come out at the end head over heels in love with the prince or princess who saved them, and they live happily ever after in a beautiful castle without a care in the world.

I can safely say that life is no Disney film.

No, my life was very much like that little homeless girl in Aladdin who scavenged around looking for food to keep her and her brother alive, only in my story I was doing what I had to do to keep my littlesisteralive.

Granted, it had been a few years since I’d had to raid bins to find food, but it had come close a few times.

There’d been more than one occasion where the crappy studio apartment we called home had been without electricity, hot water, and food in the fridge, but I tried my damn best to keep my little sister fed, watered, and warm.

Of course, it shouldneverhave been my responsibility to look after Angel, but at the tender age of fifteen, and when Angel was just six years old, my father was murdered, an innocent victim in a drive-by shooting, and instead of being a good mom and looking after her two fatherless children, my mother decided it was a brilliant idea to start injecting shit into her body.

Not actual shit, obviously, but you know, crack, heroin. Basically, anything she could get her greedy little mitts on.

I became Angel’s mom overnight, it didn’t matter about my schoolwork or the fact I was barely an adult myself, all of that went down the pan the second the selfish whore jabbed the needle into her veins in a bid to forget about the pain of losing my father like she was the only one affected by his untimely death.

Within eight months, the beautiful, carefree woman I once called my mom became nothing but a bag of skin and bones. Her face was sallow, her eyes sunken, not to mention the marks she constantly had all over her body, be that track marks from injecting or bruises from where her drug-addicted boyfriend would beat her.

Did I mention she got herself a new boyfriend within a month of us burying my dad?

Oh yeah, that was a real treat coming home from school one day to find a random guy in the living room, telling Angel and me he was our new daddy.

Then one day, the new life we were getting used to changed again.

It was the day after my not-so-sweet sixteen, and just before Angel was due to turn seven, I came home from school to find my mom dead on the sofa, needle still sticking out of her arm.

For as long as I live, I’ll never forget what it felt like to walk in and find her lying there, white foam drying around her cracked blue lips, her eyes open but no longer seeing. Nor the instructions over the phone from the emergency responder who talked me through how to give CPR until the paramedics arrived.

But even as I pressed up and down on her rock hard chest, I knew it was pointless. Her skin had started to turn gray, and she was completely still…..lifeless. The logical part of me knew I was going through the motions, even as I sobbed over her body, begging her to come back to me. When the paramedics arrived, they didn’t bother getting their equipment out to resuscitate her, they took one look before deeming life was extinct- their words, not mine.

Extinct.

And just like that, Angel and I were orphans, alone in the world. Both our parents were only children and our grandparents on both sides had passed away when Angel and I were much younger.

We had no one.

What followed was a flurry of people invading our home and acting as if they knew what was right for my sister and me. The whole time I sat in the corner listening to conversations going on around me as if I wasn’t there, social workers talking about how Angel needed complex care because of her needs, me needing counseling after I had found my mother.

Not one fucking person had the decency to stop and ask whatIwanted, or what Angel might have needed. And complex care? Pfft, she was deaf, that’s all. She was still an annoying little asshat who did everything any child her age could do, she just had the ability not to listen to all the bullshit that went on around her, the lucky little shit.

It was at the point when one of the social workers was on the phone with her boss, telling them Angel and I would need to go into different foster homes, when I decided enough was enough and over my dead body would we be split up.

Angel and I had always been close growing up, she had been a surprise baby and the minute my dad took me to the hospital to meet my little sister, I fell madly in love with her. We had only grown closer in the eight months my mom was using, I raised her as if she was my own kid, there was no way I would stand for her being taken away from me.

No one paid me any attention when I disappeared into my room to pack a bag, then into Angel’s room to throw her crap in, and finally into my mom’s room where I knew she had a couple of twenty dollar bills hidden in her underwear drawer.

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