When I was around 3, my mom and dad divorced. We used to live in a nice, 1800 square foot suburban home, but had to leave becuase it wasn't affordable anymore (not sure it ever was). My mom, siblings, and I first moved into a 1 bedroom apartment. I don't remember much about living there, except for the four of us sleeping on the bed together, and pushing my Little Tikes lawn mower that blew bubbles up and down the faintly smokey hallway. After that, we moved into a duplex at the edge of our city.

The street we were on consisted mostly of 2 story duplexes, housing many other kids aged 2 to 10. We quickly got to know our duplex neighbours. A man and a woman, Chris and Sharron, with three children, each from different fathers. The eldest son, Marcus, was a year older than me. When I first met him, I don't think he knew his real dad, but he'd eventually start spending the weekends with him, which I'm sure felt like a blessing because at just 7 years old, he was the caretaker of Brianna, the youngest child who was still a baby. She was Chris's biological daughter. The second son, Martin, was about a year younger than me. I don't know who his real dad was, his mother might not have known either.

Martin and I would spend a lot of evenings and weekends playing together. In the summer, we'd ride our bikes for hours, often putting pop cans on our back tires to make them sound like dirt bikes; build castles in my sandbox and drive Hot Wheels through them; play with Tonka trucks in the fine, powdery dirt in their front garden bed; pretend the row of three trees on the neighbours front lawn across the street was an enormous TV, and change the imaginary channels on each other and laugh. We had a lot of fun, and you'd never know the horrors that poor boy faced. Sharron, his biological mom, hung herself in their basement, and he found her there one day, hanging. She had trauma stemming from her father sexually abusing her and her siblings when she was younger. Something about taking them to a hotel and making them stand naked while he held a cattle prod. My mom told me this when we lived there, adding to "stay away from Grandpa Chris". It's fucked up. It's also fucked to think this guy, Sharron's dad, drove Martin and I to his house before. The purpose? For a car ride or something - we were only gone for an hour. I told my mom years later, and she claimed she had no idea I went.

One summer, my mom decided to remove the rotten back deck in our back yard, which left behind a large area of dirt. Martin, my young sibling, and I turned it into a mud pit with the garden hose. First we just put our feet into the mud, feeling it create a pleasant suction on our feet. I remember being provoked by my sibling somehow and deciding to throw a handful of mud at them. Soon we began hucking globs of mud at each other. We were all covered in mud, head to toe. Before being allowed back inside, we had to get hose off with some chilly water. I was surprised and relieved when Martin's "dad", Chris, found it amusing because he was an unemployed, well-fair receiving, chain smoking, Pepsi slurping, pigeon-toed tyrannical cunt.

Chris wouldn't let Martin and Marcus leave the supper table until everything on their plate was finished. Apparently this started because the school complained that they were too skinny or something, idk, they weren't that thin from what I remember. Anyway, mom would pick my siblings and I up from the baby sitter, get home around 6, have supper, then I'd go over to Martin and Marcuss place to play. I'd often find them stuck, sitting at the kitchen table with a big pile of KD still on their plates. I'd sit at the table with them, watching them slowly spooning the noodles into their mouths, laughing with each other, and after 5-10 minutes of this, Chris would usually let them be dismissed from the table, and we could finally go play.

One day, when my family was arriving home, we pulled into the driveway, and when we got out of the car, we could hear Martin wailing on the other half of the duplex from his bedroom on the second floor. He was likely getting a beating from Chris. I can recall my mom not knowing what to do because if she called the cops, Chris would know it was her.

When my family went camping one summer, we invited Martin to come along with us. My mom told me recently, whilst making the 4 hour car ride to the campground, he said out of the blue "my mom hang herself and died." then repeated it once more. I replied, telling him to stop lying. My mom set the record straight. "No, anon, he is telling the truth." Silence. We had fun camping together. The main story I remember from that trip was renting these funny 4 seater/4 wheeler bikes. My sibling and I were pedaling and Martin was in control of the steering wheel. Randomly, he decided to take us off the gravel road we were on, down into a grassy ditch lmao my siblings berated him, but he just kept laughing lol

Fast forwarding several years after my family moved away from that duplex, I heard, around the age of 14, he went to juvy (juvenile detention) for doing wrong to Brianna. I can't confirm this, but I can confirm that, around the age of 23, he and a friend made the papers for doing a good deed in the city. Today, I found him on Facebook, and he's uploaded a handful of satanic art and gorey makeup photos (not his artwork), which isn't too surprising. What's crazier was seeing a few posts he wrote about an ex-gf killing his pets. Going through his profile, he comes off as a guy that loves animals, likes helping people, and getting up to silly, harmless mischief. Despite the trauma he's experienced, he seems to be doing ok though.