It all started sometime after her thirteenth birthday. Granted, her life hadn’t exactly been a cakewalk before then, but at least she’d had some friends to provide her with a refuge from the unhappiness she found at home.

Her friend Donna had thrown an end-of-summer pool party for her friends at her grandmother’s house. She knew all her friends from the neighborhood would be there – Karen, Donna (of course), Stephanie, and Linda for sure. They were a pretty tight group of girls, so she didn’t think anyone else would be there.

Her parents were extremely conservative, so she had never owned anything but an unflattering one-pieces bathing suit. And no matter how she pleaded, her parents would never buy her anything cooler, even though all her friends had bikinis. She was also called “shy” an awful lot – just because she didn’t feel like she had to talk over everyone else or blurt out whatever was on her mind. It wasn’t fair, but that’s the label her friends and her parents had put on her.