Prologue

I have come to the conclusion that there can be mean girls in any species. They are not just amongst the humans. They are not limited to the teen years, either.  Although, they seem to be more prevalent during that time. What led me to this conclusion was simple experience.  You see, I was a victim of mean girls of the worst type starting at a rather sensitive age.

The mean girl abuse didn’t start until I was in my mid-teens and my mother moved us from a small West Virginia township with a population of twenty-two that was located about two hours from Washington, DC to a community that just managed to qualify as a city with its population of twenty-five-thousand and ten. It was located just over the Virginia border, which shortened my mother’s drive to her monthly meeting of the witch wannnabes in downtown DC by an hour. 

The little township of Bloomsburg, West Virginia consisted, mostly, of my blood relatives which were either the Loftus or the O’Shea – all of whom were fascinated with witchcraft.  To my knowledge, however, none had been able to truly master it. 

The small city of Meddleson, Virginia was void of any of my kin other than those in my household – my mother, one older half-brother, and one older half-sister – both of whom left for college before we were even settled in. It did, however, possess a closely knit community of actual practicing witches. It was my mother’s hope to be able to rub elbows with these magic practitioners and finally learn the art. She insisted that witchcraft was in our blood and it was simply lost to time and oppression. If we could mix and mingle with those who had not lost it, we would surely get it back.

At the time, I had no interest in learning or practicing magic, nor could I understand why my family felt it was such an important talent to possess.

My half-siblings’ father died in a car accident when they were quite young. He was the love of my mother’s life. No matter what room in our home that you might venture into, you  were sure to find at least one photo of him.  

I never knew my own father. Nor was there a photo of him for me to see. Whenever I would ask my mother to tell me about him, she would insist that he was nothing more than a sperm donor who had passed through our little borough in the night and I was to give him no more thought than that.  Although I found it disappointing, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as the intense emotion that I would sense pouring from every pore of my mother’s body whenever I brought up the subject of my father.  She would visibly tremble with what I had assumed was the desire to see him dead, or, at the very least, castrated and paraded, naked, through the streets.