by Jennifer Cannon

Created on: July 11, 2008

I started out in this life as an only child and, frankly, that was working out pretty well for me. My parents were divorced and I was enjoying living with my grandmother, who had been taking care of me since before I could walk. After some honest self-reflection I can acknowledge that Gram spoiled me, not rotten, just spoiled. Life with Gram was sweet.
Around the age of eight, my father met and married the woman who would dominate my young years with a combination of frenetic Brady-Bunch-like-activities mixed with manipulation and ultimate control over every moment of my daily existence. Upon the union of my father and the woman who we will refer to herein as "Lulu", I also inherited two step-brothers.

We grew up in a very small ski resort town nestled in one of the beautiful mountain ranges of Southern California. It was the kind of place where you could safely let your kids walk the mile or so to town to pick up a gallon of milk during a snowstorm, or to drop them off at the lake to rent a row boat and do a little fishing during the summer.
At the age of 15 I did not enjoy what one might consider the normal freedoms of a teenage girl. For the record, I was considered the "goody too shoes" in my small group of friends and hadn't experimented with much of anything other than kissing a boy occasionally. If I were given permission to be anywhere other than my house, it was well a known fact that Lulu could and would show up randomly to check on me.
On a lovely summer afternoon, June 15, 1982, it was my best friend, Lisa's 15th birthday. We called it her "golden" birthday because she was turning 15 on the 15th. We had plans to spend the afternoon swimming at their community pool, which was normally empty (of people, not water). We would have the place to ourselves, five girls, Loverboy blaring on the cassette player, Hi-C and a box of Oreo's. What could be better than that? These were pretty innocent times, at least in our world.
There was one minor detail that needed to be worked out, however. The other girls were all going to be wearing bikinis and I didn't have one. I was not allowed to wear a bikini. Now, I was a little more developed than my friends at this point, and not something I was happy about, so finding a top to fit me was a challenge. After some rummaging through my friend's older sister's drawers though, we found a top that worked and someone else had bottoms I could borrow. They didn't match, but I didn't care, I was with my friends and they didn't

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