New additional excerpt from Tomboy Contract

Spencer Marx was a nice and reasonably bright girl. She lived all her life going from foster home to foster home, never staying for more than a few years. Although she lived at these places, she never considered them "home".

When hearing the saying "home is where the heart is" she would immediately think of her best friend, Shane. He'd been there for her growing up and she'd try her best to be there for him.

At fourteen years old, after being shipped off from a not bad home to a bad home, her foster siblings, Peter and Ana, convinced her to steal their parents cigarettes. And she did it. Convincing her to smoke one wasn't hard. She didn't like the taste, or the feeling in her lungs, but the praising her foster siblings gave her for being a "badass" won her over. Their foster father discovered the missing cigarettes a few hours later, and they were all punished for stealing.

The next thing they had her try was whiskey. They'd taken it from the liquor cabinet when Carey and Tom, how their foster parents now demanded they'd be called, were piss drunk and passed out on the couch in front of the tv. Although it burned on the way down, and Peter tried to quiet her coughing so as to not wake Carey and Tom, she liked the feeling it gave her. All of the abuse she'd suffered in the past no longer felt like her fault. Instead it was everyone else's. Whoever was there to blame it on, it was theirs. They could deal with it. Carey discovered the missing whiskey the next day, and they were all punished for stealing.

Ana discovered Valium in Tom's bedside drawer. She'd heard that it treated depression, and she knew that she was depressed, so she took all of them. Peter and Spencer found her an hour later on the bathroom floor cold and gray. Peter was punished severely for his little sister's theft, and Spencer could only watch. Tom and Carey were punished for Peter's murder and Spencer was sent to a new home.

By her fifteenth birthday, Spencer had been to three new homes because she was "unmanageable." She'd been suspended from school 4 times. The pity the principle had for the poor orphan kept her from being expelled. She stole, from alcohol, to drugs, and she always made a show of how unapologetic she was about it. Her foster parents tried to punish her, but she was used to it now.

At seventeen years old, the only friend that remained with her through her struggles decided that something needed to be done. She was on the fast track to addiction and the highway to hell. They needed to get her off of it. Together with his mother and brother (and his cat) they gathered her in their living room and convinced her to stop. They told her that this is only hurting her more, that she's slowly killing herself. She screamed, she punched a wall, she went to a hospital, and then she slowly got better.

She got a job, she cut out alcohol and drugs, and she got more friends. It was as Shane's popularity grew and his want to put her in videos that she fell. There was the shipping and the hate messages (so many hate messages), and then Shane started to change. It wasn't a bad change, but was different. He was much more vulgar and loud, yet more depressed, like he wasn't himself. Her decline continued and he didn't even notice.

It wasn't until he got a call at ten in the morning on a Tuesday by Spencer's coworker, Seth, that he realized. Spencer hadn't come into work, and he was worried. Shane called and called but Spencer never picked up. Driving to the apartment she's lived in since she turned 18, he convinced himself that she was asleep. That she'd had a long night, and overslept. When he got there, he did find her asleep, but she didn't wake up. He found an open, mostly empty bottle of Tylenol on the table next to her. He called an ambulance and they took her away. Spencer Marx died that day and Shane punished himself for not seeing it sooner.

Her inner torment is over.

A/n: My uncle died of an overdose this past Friday, so I thought I'd post something about drugs. To be honest with you, I didn't really like him, and now that he's gone, I'm not going to pretend to, because he caused a lot of problems and heartache for my family. He was an alcoholic for a long time and an angry one at that. I grew up spending at least one night a month in a motel with my parents and brother because he lived with us and my parents didn't want us around him while he was drunk.

But he was family. My grandmother and my mother cried so hard they had trouble breathing and you can hear, even now four days later, in their voices, they're not okay.

I wish I could do something, I wish I could make it better, but the hard truth is that I can't. Please be careful with drugs and alcohol. Be safe, please. Life is not a video game where you have infinite lives. It's perma death, so be careful what you do with the one life you have.

I love you.

Kthnxbai

Jinx *heart eyes emoji*