Nightmare on Octavia Street (1)

We lived in San Francisco for about a year. My parents had just split up and my mom took us to stay with some of her flaky friends. I was like eight and my sister was nine. I don't know what it is that makes people go crazy and change their entire lives when a relationship ends. Big deal. My dad was never around much to begin with, always away for work. And when he was home, they argued all the time. But they often kissed and made up. Passionate souls, that's how they liked to refer to themselves when laughing it all away with friends. Until my father told my mom he'd fallen for another woman. One he also had kids with already. Say what?

Even though he turned his back on us, I don't hate him, never have. My sister still misses him a lot. She used to wait for him to come home so he'd take her for icecream down the block. I never cared much about icecream. And now I also think I understand it wasn't the icecream that made my sister so happy. It was being in the company of dad.

Anyway, we moved into the basement of a building on Octavia Street. My mom grew up in San Francisco, so she still had ties there. When she met our dad in Europe, they stayed in London. Both my sister and I were born in London, by the way. Somehow my dad insisted we were better off born there instead of in the States. Before we arrived, they had apparently been living in two homes, one in London and the other in Los Angeles, because that's where dad worked a lot at the time. We basically lived in L.A. and spent our holidays in London. And when my parents split up, we left L.A. for San Francisco. My dad moved away to a small town in Delaware. Don't ask why. If he could have kept having kids with another woman a secret for so long, who knows what else we have no clue of, right? Granna says he hasn't forgotten us, but that my mom's attitude makes it tough to somehow stay in touch. I do know he pays a huge sum of money each month, and that my sister and I will get a lot of money when we turn 21. I don't know. There's plenty of rich kids around, like those students from #49? One of the guys OWNS the building, can you imagine. His dad bought it for him, because he didn't want to stay at the dorm he was in. But does money make you happy? Our family didn't stay together and we had money. It can't buy happiness, but it can buy diversion, that much I know.

The basement in Octavia Street was a horrible place to live. It was damp, dark and it smelled like something had died in there. My mom's friends had used it for their seances and you''ll sympathize with me when I tell you they said there was the possibility of some ghosts still lurking about from time to time, even though there wasn't anyone summoning them with an ouija-board. Great. My mom was emotionally on the rocks and on top of that, we had to deal with her crazy friends.