Chapter One
Have you ever met someone so royally screwed up that they could lie and cheat without feeling any morsel of regret? Well, if you haven’t - allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brittney Dale and I try hard not to blame others for the way I turned out, but then again, I can’t really take all of the credit myself either.
My mother was, for lack of a better word, a whore for Chaos Theory, the local motorcycle club. She used to tell me stories from before her dark days - stories of my father. She claimed he was a fine, upstanding man with plenty of money and a big house. When I was younger I liked to live in that fantasy, but as I got older I began to realize it was all a lie.
I eventually found out who my father was. His name was Billy and he was one of my mom’s Johns. When she came to him for help after discovering her pregnancy, he drove her to a women’s shelter and that’s where she lived for the nine months she carried me. She always boasted that she stayed clean during her pregnancy, though I didn’t believe that for a second. It was a miracle I had both ears and two working arms.
After I was born, mom got kicked out of the shelter for using drugs and she started wandering from hotel to hotel, turning tricks to try and keep us off the street. For years that’s how it was. We wandered from city to city, scrounging through dumpsters and sleeping on park benches. Sometimes she managed to pool enough money to get us a hotel room for the week. I remember how much I loved that. I would sit in the hot bath water until my skin turned an angry red. It was the only time I felt clean in those days.
I never went to school because we never stayed in one place long enough for the government to catch up with mom. Whenever the local cops came knocking, we took off to another city. We spent my entire childhood bouncing around wandering through the Deep South until we eventually made it to Tennessee.
When we started living in Nashville, I was only about nine. According to my mother I was old enough to take care of myself. She would go away for days and leave me without food or money, so I did the only thing I could. I would go to the local grocery store and take what I needed. No one really suspected that a young girl was coming to their store to steal, so it was always rather easy to just walk in and grab whatever I wanted.
The day I was caught, was the day my life changed forever. One of the stores I’d been frequenting finally caught onto me and the store owner snatched my arm and called the cops. When I explained the situation to the police, they started snooping around. While they never found mom, they did discover my living situation and took me into protective custody.
I was put into the foster system immediately and that began the worst eight years of my life. And considering how the first nine years were, that’s really saying something. They never found my mother and so she never went to jail. I was left trying to navigate a system I didn’t understand with tools that weren't considered acceptable.
My mother, when she was around, never got angry when I lied or stole. There were no repercussions. Now I was suddenly living in a world with incredibly strict rules that I struggled to conform to.
All of a sudden there was dinner time, bath time, and bedtime. I couldn’t take three showers a day like I'd been used to doing, and I had to eat what the foster home made, when they made it. If I wasn't hungry at dinnertime, I didn't eat until breakfast.
Looking back on it, I understand that everyone did their best. They were trying to provide structure and discipline, but that wasn't how I understood it. You couldn't take a kid who'd spent their entire life trying to survive on their own and expect them to just assimilate. That's just wasn’t how it worked.
School was even harder. I started going to classes that I didn’t really understand. I was nine, so they put me with the rest of the nine year olds, but I hadn’t had any schooling up until that point. I read at a very basic level and math completely escaped me. Overall, I was far behind my peers and no one seemed to understand that it was because I’d never sat in a classroom before. My teachers all thought I was stupid or just a flat out bad kid. I tried for a long time, but eventually gave up.
Instead of paying attention in class, I just started slipping away and skipping school. I got in trouble for it many times, but I didn’t really care. I would go hang out with the older kids who seemed to like me well enough, though it was only because I was willing to steal candies and snacks for them.
The foster home eventually got tired of my delinquency and I started bouncing around from home to home until my mother managed to find me. I hadn’t seen her in eight years, but I couldn’t resist her offer. She would take me away from the school and away from the foster homes. It was an offer that sounded too good to be true. I was so tired of all the fighting and yelling. I was tired of feeling unwanted and stupid. So despite all of the things she’d done when I was young, I happily went with her and joined the biker gang.
It would become both the best and worst choice I’d ever make. Welcome to my life.