From Casey's Point of View

So I started writing this story. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with it. I started it a certain way, and now it's heading in a different direction. But anyway, this is the beginning of it.

Casey Cronan seemed like the average 8 year old girl. She wore her long golden hair in braided pigtails to school everyday. She played hopscotch and jumped rope with her friends at recess, and ate her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off. Every night when she laid her head down and closed her dreary eyes, she dreamed of being a princess dressed in an elegant pink gown. However, Casey was far from ordinary. Casey noticed more than most kids her age, and she understood the realities of this cruel world we live in better than most adults.

Casey waved goodbye to her neighbor Mr. Foreman as her dad pulled out of the driveway to take her to school. Mr. Foreman was an elderly man with little hair on the top of his head, who was always ready to share a cup of hot chocolate over a warm conversation. He was the only one who really understood Casey for who she was, and was the only person who Casey truly trusted. On most days after school Casey would run to Mr. Foreman's door and wait impatiently for him to come out and sit in the chairs on the front porch and tell her stories from his past. Sometimes Casey would share stories too. Each evening when dusk came and darkness began to swallow what was left of the sunlight, Casey knew it was time for her to walk across the yard back to her own home. Whenever Casey would stand up to leave, he would look into her sparkling blue eyes and whisper ever so softly, "Remember who you are, and don't ever let anyone try to change that." Casey heard this nearly everyday for the last two years, but was still not entirely sure what it meant. All she knew at this point in her brief life was that she was different than most kids, and that Mr. Foreman was the only person including herself who knew why.

Like most evenings when Casey shed her coat by the front door, she entered her house to find her dad in the office on his phone. She sat quietly by the door and waited for him to end his conversation. However, Casey's dad worked for the government ans was a very busy man. At the age of six, Casey already knew all about taxes and I.R.S. agents because that was all her dad knew how to talk about. It wasn't that he wasn't a good father. He tried his very best to provide for her every need, but sometimes it was the things she needed the most that he neglected. It was times like these that Casey wished even more that her mother was still around, because the truth was George Cronan didn't know how to be both a dad and a mom. Casey's mom was murdered in her own home about five years earlier. Although Casey was only two years old at the time, she knows more about the catastrophe than anyone would ever give her credit. Casey was the only witness of the murder, and the images of her mother's brutal death are some that will remain with her for the rest of her life. Besides her own majestic blue eyes, these visions are really the only thing Casey's mother left behind for her. Sometimes in the dead silence, she can still her the shriek that was her mother's last cry. A plea for help. And because Casey was merely an infant, there was nothing she could do to save her mom. She thinks about these things daily, but rarely does she ever speak of them. Casey was strong, and although she lived nearly every second of her life in fear, she never let her fears consume her. Mr. Foreman was the only one she really ever talked about these things to, and he always seemed very intrigued. She thought his may have something to do with why he always told her to remember who she is. She wasn't sure. But if there is one thing she knew, that she learned from her own mother's death is this: You can't trust anyone.