My name is Ashley Davies and I am twenty years old. I have been living on the streets since I was seventeen. I lived a life of abuse from my parents since I was ten. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t love me, they did. It was more because they were trying to make me tough. They knew what the world was like and they were just trying to prepare me for it. They taught me how to fight and how to take a beating. By the time I was fourteen I had bruises all down my sides and on my legs. My gym coach noticed it when I was changing but when she asked me about it, I lied and said it was just me wrestling with my friends. From then on, anytime I had bruises, I didn’t go to gym class. Instead I would hang out behind the school and walk through the woods with a cigarette pressed between my lips. The one time I got caught skipping class, I was smoking behind a tree. I would have gotten in trouble but my gym teacher told the school about the bruises. I couldn’t believe it. I hated that woman for it. Social services got involved and eventually they took me from my home and forced me to live with these people I didn’t even know. I ended up living with some woman who was always working, some guy who was a famous rock star and I had a little sister. Her name was Kyla and she was adopted too. I was a year older than her and we came to the conclusion that we were adopted for a publicity stunt. For some strange reason she looked up to me. She drank what I drank, smoked what I smoked and did what I did.

I came to the conclusion when I was seventeen that it was time for payback. We were adopted for a publicity stunt so how would the press like it if his golden charity case left? When I left I didn’t have anywhere to go so I would move from place to place in California parks. I would spend a night on a bench and the next morning I would go to the next park. The first time someone threw money at me I was offended, so I threw it back at them. One day someone left a newspaper on a bench so I decided to read it. Lead headline was how my foster parents agreed to let me move out and how they were funding my new apartment. I called them right after to hear them yell at me for pulling such a stunt. All I did was ask to talk to Kyla. She was mad at me for a minute or two because I left her to deal on her own. She tried telling me she was going to leave, but I wouldn’t let her. I know this life, and I don’t want her to live it too.