My story starts with an ending. It isn’t a satisfying ending, but then again if it were I wouldn’t need more story.

I would like to say that I lived a good life, I wanted to live a good life, but the world seemed to hate Alice Cross. At least that is how it felt as I lay on the floor in my barely furnished living room, my chest feeling like it was exploding. I’ve had panic attacks before that I mistook for heart attacks. This was very different.

I am getting ahead of myself, I think. I have never been good at autobiographies, even though my life has been pretty simple and dull. I was born in a fairly large sized college town in the middle of the bible belt. I was lucky enough to not be in a household that was fire and brimstone preaching, but not lucky enough to be in a home full of love. My parents never got along as far as I can remember. They divorced when I was 7 and my mother disappeared. I never heard from her again.

My dad was amazing, at first. I think he just exhausted himself trying to prove to the world that he was an awesome dad. That made him vulnerable to the witch of a woman that made my life hell. She was never nice to me, I don’t get how my father missed that. He seemed to think it was proper discipline and was made to believe that he had been too soft on me.

When I was 13, they married and she brought two awful brats with her. I felt like Cinderella, only my father was still, technically, alive. He was a shell of a man, beaten down by life and by the constant nagging of his wife. They worked him to the bone as she refused to be anything but a stay at home mom. Her chores around the house were things she made me do along with watching my new step-siblings.

I managed the best I could. I hated her and hated my dad for bringing her into our lives. When I turned 18, she kicked me out of the house. That morning. She had one bag packed for me and said that I should have figured something out as I am an adult now and must be responsible for myself. I had no job, no money saved up as I was never given money, no anything. Just a bag full of clothes and my backpack as I still had a month of high school left.

My last month in high school was spent with me sleeping in a homeless shelter. I know people have had it worse than me, but as I lay dying I couldn’t help but lament on just how shitty my life has been. It did pick up a little bit.

I got a job, started college thanks to my amazing grades, found a roommate that wasn’t great but was tolerable. She hated when I cooked and bitched at me for being awake late at night in my room, but it wasn’t the kind of abuse I grew up with so it was fine.

It was a shame my roommate had moved out two days earlier after being fed up with the harassment from my step-mom. It had been a year and a half since I heard from my family. Just one day, out of the blue, she started to blow up my phone at all hours of the day and night. When I blocked her, she actually showed up at the door demanding I come home with her right then and take care of the mess I left them in. From her info on social media, they were facing a foreclosure due to my father getting into an accident and losing his job. She said my money was their money because we are family and that I was making them homeless.

It was laughable… and traumatizing. No one could scream like her. My ears would ring for days.

After I blocked her on everything imaginable, I informed my apartment complex that she was not welcome and to not let her onto the property again. That’s when the welfare checks started. Every other day I would have cops knocking at my door saying an anonymous call was made that I was an imminent danger to myself or to my roommate or that I was selling drugs or stolen college books.

I never thought I would actually want that crazy woman to have called another welfare check on me, but now was the time. I am fairly certain that the pounding of fist on the door across the hall is what threw me from anxiety attack to full blown heart attack as I just couldn’t take another rough visit from the police. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, no one would reach me in time and I knew it. Honestly, I was done. Sick of life and at least this way I can say I didn’t give up. Life gave up on me, right?

My vision was dimming. I pulled off my glasses, ran a hand through my greasy hair, and sighed as much as I could sigh with this shortness of breath.

“Finally done…”