The Art of Subconscious Illusion

Prologue

My name is Susan Luscinia, I am currently a twenty-one year old Sophomore in college who is studying journalism and creative writing. I go to a small community college and am head of my school newspaper, with a few close friends whom entered my life in my first year of college. For the first time in my life, since the day that I graduated from Huntington Beach High School. My life had done a complete one hundred and eighty degrees turn to get to the person I am today.

This story is almost like a modern day fairytale the way that some of this is going to sound. I know, it is pretty cliche for me to compare my life to that, but it really was. My mother had died during childbirth and my father became a drunk and a abuser, blaming me for everything until the day I called CPS on him and got him thrown in jail. Then I went into a group home for children when I was only six, but no one seemed to be interested in the small little red headed girl with cornflower blue eyes. Many people came in and acting as though they were interested in me, but always ended up leaving with another kid. I was finally adopted at the age of thirteen into the Kripke family, who had seven other children already and they were unable to have another successful pregnancy, nor did they have time to actually take time to raise a baby.

My adoptive family seemed so fantastic when I had first gotten there, all fawning and loving me...showing me something that I hadn’t felt ever in my life and that all change within the very first month. My adoptive parents were both strict Catholics, who expect each and every one of their children to go to church with them whenever Mass was held. With all the shit I had gone through, there was no way that I could believe that a great and righteous God would let me go through all the pain and suffering that I did. I would go, but it sure as hell didn’t mean I was going to listen to the line they were trying to feed me.

Danielle and Adam Kripke were the parents, both were loyal members to the church and both were in real estate. Erka and Tristan were the first set of twins, both were seventeen when I first got here and both were involved in school sports. Victoria and Alan were the next at the age of fifteen, both in Choir in school and at church. Selena and Annabelle were fourteen years old and they were the only ones who didn’t treat me like shit, both were artists. Adam Junior was the last and final child, at the age of ten and he was a little nark who constantly was getting me in trouble with the parents.

My home life was chaotic, but then again anyone who were to live in a home with seven other siblings in a strongly Catholic home where you weren’t born into. I was forced to do all the cleaning and cooking, if not they would ground me from the gifts they had gotten me when I first moved in. A old Windows XP and a hand-me-down Motorola Razr, which were ancient technology, but who was I to complain? It was the best thing since sliced bread!

As for how my Middle and High school years were...well, they were absolute Hell for me considering I was the adopted kid in a house full of well known Catholics who came in during the middle of the second semester. No one wanted to get to know me and treated me as though I was disease ridden with how pale I was for the California sun. Most people just left me alone, making snide comments behind my back and smartass comments written in the bathroom stalls. Most people realized after a while that I didn’t want to be friends with them anyways, Out of all of those people, one made it his personal mission in life to ruin anything and everything for me and make my life a living Hell. Now he is in some famous rock band with all of his friends from high school, thinking he is all that and a bag of chips.

Yet, I have moved past all of this...all the pain and torment I suffered through my entire life, working on bettering myself and becoming the person I always have wanted to be. Or so I thought I had moved past all of it, everything had been perfectly fine until that night...it was the stupidest thing I had chose to agree to. To this very day, I blame myself and there is no way that I could turn back time now.

I won’t lie to you all and say this is going to be all rainbows and butterflies and Happily Ever Afters, because this is real life. All that happy horse shit is for the birds when it comes to how people deal with the situations you are going to read. If I have got your attention and you want to read on, you are a very brave soul. If I have scared you away because real life should stay in real life, I can’t exactly blame you. Thanks for giving my story a chance and I will leave you at this prologue with four words to start off any fairytale…

Once Upon a Time…