• HER STORY

    Let me give you a little background about myself. My full name is Megan Elizabeth Young, and I am just a little over nineteen years old. Victoria is my half-sister only because we have the same mom but different dads. If you asked me who Victoria was I would say my baby sister and be done with it. Victoria has a full-blooded sister, Christine, or Chrissy for short, who just turned eighteen a couple moths ago. There is six of us all together. The other three consist of Amy, Timmy, and Patrick, our two step-brothers and our one step-sister. I’m not going into a lot of detail now, because this is her story, so let us begin.
    Her story is not an ordinary one. Okay maybe it is. She was born on July 23rd, 1997 at around 7:30 p.m. She weighed seven pounds, seven ounces, and she was beautiful. She had the biggest eyes anyone had ever seen and everyone was entranced by them. I was six years old when she was born. My other sister was five years old. She was named Victoria Lynn Fuller. At the time of her birth I was at my “grandma Sherry’s” house because she was watching my other sister and I. When we all got to the hospital after she was born I remember saying to my mom “Why is she so small?” and all my mother said was “that’s how all babies start out. Small.” I responded by saying, “she’s beautiful isn’t she mom?” and she said, “Yes. She is very beautiful.” She came home three days later and I was so excited to have another baby sister.
    I remember asking my mom if I could bring my new little sister into class for show and tell, but my mom said no. I was bummed a little because I was so proud to be a big sister. She was just like all babies are with the crying, and the pooping, and the eating, and the sleeping, which went on for what seemed like forever. At a year old my mom figured out that something wasn’t right, because she still wasn’t crawling or even trying to walk. My mom took her to several doctors and some told us that she had brain damage, but then others told us that there was nothing wrong. We were on our last nerve when we came to the one doctor who told us what was wrong with Vicki. (That’s her nickname).
    He told us that when Vicki was born that she had a stroke. Then he told us even more bad news. He said that she would never be able to walk, talk, or be like a normal child. My mom and my grandma (my mom’s mom) were devastated. They didn’t know what they were going to do. All we could do was pray. She was my little buddy. Ever since she was big enough and I was big enough, I would carry her on my hip. I did this for I don’t know how long.
    When she was two years old, and I eight, we joined a daycare because my mom was working and so was my grandma. Vicki’s father was a drunk and didn’t do anything for us. Vicki had a physical therapist there to help her learn how to walk. Since me and her were so close, most of the time I could tell what she was thinking, even though she was still learning how to talk. Well this therapist wasn’t a very nice person. She would hit Vicki if she didn’t so exactly as the therapist said, or if she stumbled when she walked. My mother was furious when she found out, and so was I. I guess that’s when it became clear that I wasn’t only her big sister, but her protector.
    Finally she learned how to walk and talk, against the doctor’s warnings. By now she was four. My mom and Vicki’s dad were in the middle of a divorce, so Vicki, Chrissy, and I would go visit him on the weekends since he was still our “dad”. On this particular weekend it was just me and Vicki. Of course her dad was drunk, like he usually was when we saw him. Here’s what happened. She wanted a cup of water. A cup of water from a cup that I couldn’t reach, plus we weren’t allowed to touch anything in the kitchen. So when she asked him for a cup of water, he pulled down the cup, but then flung the cup at her, which hit her in the forehead. Then, he went outside to smoke. She started crying because she was bleeding a little bit from her forehead, plus that probably hurt a lot. I got a chair from the dining room and pulled down the box of band-aids and put it on the cut. That night when my mom came to get us, she saw Vicki’s forehead and asked what happened.
    The next day, we were all down at the police station filing a report against Tyler (Vicki’s dad). He got served, went to jail, then got out. And so began the vicious cycle of serving, jailing, and bailing. We had already moved out of the house that our parents had shared while they were married, but during the divorce process we moved back in with my grandmother (my mom’s mom). I remember Vicki and I already looked so alike that when we went out and I got my hair cut, she would get hers done the same way so we could always look alike. I remember all the times people would come up to us commenting on how much we looked alike; we were like twins almost. I called her my mini-me. She was my baby girl and I was her me-me.
    Vicki was always in my sight. She never wanted me to be away from her, in fact when I got to be around 12 or 13 I would walk around with Vicki all the time and people in grocery stores and other super markets would ask me if she was my daughter. I would laugh and think to myself ‘are these people crazy or what? I’m only twelve years old, do you seriously think I’m old enough to have a daughter that is six years old?’ People made me laugh with questions like that, but I always would tell them that she was just my baby sister, and then once they saw my mom they would see the resemblance in the three of us, because face it, I looked exactly like my mother, and Vicki looked exactly like me.
    She was my angel. She still is. It’s been three years now since she died. That’s hard for me, knowing how little I’ve done since she’s died.