My cousin, Beth Rae was my very best friend for a long time. I don’t know if she even knows that. We lived across the street from each other and used to stand out in our front yards when we couldn’t play together and just chit-chat. I remember Judy’s Beauty Shop in a little trailer in their back yard years ago!

I used to love going to her house and hanging out, especially if we were getting ready to go to The Dream! I used to like to watch her do her makeup and chat her ears off. I am certain I made Beth mad at me on more than one occasion, but the one I remember so vividly well is: for some reason I started calling her “Befus R” and she’d get this distasteful look on her face and that went on for awhile before one day she got spit fire MAD and exclaimed to me to never call her that again!

Beth’s mom is my dads sister Judy, and they had a lava lamp on the TV in their den when we were young. Coolest thing I think I’d ever seen, I remember just standing there watching it do its thing for long spans of time. Beth’s dad kept and still keeps an immaculate yard in Signpost. I remember a few of us trying to watch exactly how he was cutting his grass because it seemed he NEVER had any piles of grass left over, and his mower didn’t have a bag on it either, for the trimmings to get caught in. He knows a trick, or has a method that hes perfected to a science is what I think we finally decided…

Beth is the first teenager I knew to have her own telephone in her bedroom and she had one of those phones that was only the handset and you just placed that down on the nightstand to hang it up, like there was no base for it to sit on.

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I climbed out of my upstairs bedroom window onto the little porch roof and made my way to the edge, holding on and crawling backwards. The gritty pebbles on the tiles where digging into my knees and hands. I was too afraid to jump so I made my way back up and in the window again.
In and out, over and over, I kept losing my nerve. I knew I couldn’t just go out the back or front door because she was sleeping on the couch and I’d have to walk past her, and what if she caught me! The reason she was sleeping on the couch is because there had been a terrible fight at our house that night. She had been up to her sisters that day and left me home with my chore list. She had told me I had too many things to get done so I wouldn’t be going skating that night. Well, I worked all day long and did get my chores done and I went to Gam’s house and asked her if I could go to the skating rink with my cousins – like all Friday nights. My dad wasn’t home either. She said I could go and gave me the 5$ I needed to get in and for a snack. I had my own skates with pink pom poms on them.

Well, when I got home from that my step mom was sitting in the living room- in the dark. She said “I thought I told you you weren’t going skating tonight” so I explained I had finished my chores and went and asked Gam if I could go…that did not end well at all, it ended in her chasing me up the stairs and beating me in a frenzy of anger and meanness. She lost her cool and my dad was home! She never lost her cool when he was home. Before I knew it he was pulling her off of me and trying to stop the fit of rage she was in. My heart was pounding, I thought I was going to pass out, adrenaline I guess, fear, fight, flight? The last thing my dad yelled up the stairs to me before he went to bed was “April, don’t you leave this house tonight”. He’d never ever said anything like that to me before, I guess he knew in his heart though because I was indeed leaving that house that night. Never again was I going to go through another one of those ordeals. It was June 1984, I was 15.

Eventually I made my way to the edge of the roof and let my little brown purse fall to the ground. I knew this would make me have to jump because no way could I let her find my purse out there when the sun came up. So I jumped, and rolled and grabbed my purse and ran to the front yard. No idea what time of night it was but I saw Beth’s bedroom light on and I knew she had that little phone and I wanted her to let me use it to call my mom to come and get me. I knocked on her window. Beth knew many things about my life and how I was treated, but she was scared too. She told me she wanted to go get her mom. Few minutes later, Judy opens the front door and lets me in. I explained what had happened and she gave me two choices. She said I either go back home and get in my bed, or go to Gam’s and that she would call her and tell her I was coming.

Gam sat up with me a long time listening to all the things I told her. She eventually told me to go to sleep. When I woke up and it was daylight, the first thing I did was look out Gam’s window and I saw my yellow curtain, still on the outside of my open bedroom window. I was scared again. Heart pounding again, I needed to run, but where to? I think Gam called my dad, because here he came with his work boots on but not tied. He chuckled a tiny second and asked me why I didn’t use the door. I reminded him softly that he told me not to leave the house. I cannot recall all the things he and Gam said but I remember Gam standing in front of my dad and she said I was not going back to that house again, and I was old enough to know right from wrong so I would be okay living with my mom now, and to call her to come and get me.

I left Signpost that day when my mom arrived, she told me she had left her job as soon as she got the call and was indeed still in her nursing uniform and her brother Phil riding shotgun in case back up was needed. All I had were the clothes I had on and my brown purse that took the fall before I did.