I live in a large, dirty city. Every day I hitch a ride to school, but most of the time I play truant with my foul-mouthed friends. I don’t know how they came to be my friends, but I guess it just happened. We met on the streets one day and that was that. They get into a lot of trouble that I try to stay out of. My mother makes sure that I do, because she makes me go to classes for “troubled teens.”

“Alice,” she says to me one day, “you’ve got to stop acting like white trash.”

So, that is how it came to be that my weekends were spent away from my friends and at those pointless classes. They were supposed to set me on the right path, but honestly, I think they did me more harm than good. Once you get like me, it’s hard to change.

Every night I hear the sound of sirens rushing past my small apartment Mom and I live in. Sometimes my friends, Karen mostly, pound on the door, asking for a place to stay tonight since their parent just got arrested again. I let them in, but Mom, she says they need to go to an orphanage. Me, well I’d never let that happen to one of the group. We’re like sisters, for some of us it’s the only family they have. My, it would be mighty hard living like that, but I am pretty close to it.

I once got sent to juevy, and my mom had to bail me out. See, I didn’t really do anything, I was only caught at the scene of the crime, so to speak. One of the group, Melinda actually, was caught stealing a pack of gum and some other things and I just so happened to be with her. They thought I was stealing too, so we both ended up in juevy. Once my mom bailed me out, I persuaded her to bail Melinda out, and she did, too. She said she regretted that decision ever since she made it. That was when she decided to send me to those classes.

The gang and I were always getting into some sort of trouble, but the cops could never catch us for being truants. Oh, they knew we skipped, alright, but we were good at hiding. Every once in a while we did go to school, but when we did, we didn’t do so hot. It was a rough life, but we didn’t mind it. However, none of us knew that it would get a whole lot rougher.

Let me explain the situation. We had our own turf, in a way, and another gang had theirs. We sometimes got into fights, but my gang tried to avoid them. The rivals were called The Butterflies. We didn’t have a name because we thought it was stupid. The Butterflies were more organized than we were, but we still fought the same. We considered ourselves the best girl gang around. The Butterflies did, too, and that’s why they wanted to beat us at our own game.

So there my group was, walking the streets of our territory, when The Butterflies came up and got in our faces. Well, we weren’t going to take that kind of thing from them, so we ended up in a fight. We were doing pretty well when this monster of a girl from the other side came up and attacked me and Karen. Karen and I looked at each other and then Karen jumped her while I hit her repeatedly. You see, Karen and I didn’t mean for it to happen. She just sort of collapsed, but I stopped hitting her right away. Then, she gave a last heave and just died. By that time every one had stopped fighting, and when they knew the girl was dead, they flew like hornets to their homes. Strange thing, though, that as I looked at her body, I saw blood coming from her back, as if she had been stabbed. I disregarded the fact as I fled from the scene.

That was when we heard the sirens. That was when Karen and I became fugitives. That was when I started to live the life of a murderess.