Chapter 2

When she was done cleaning up Janet's mess, Katelyn retreated to her bedroom and locked the door. Her bedroom was the one place where she felt safe. When she was locked in her room, she felt like she was escaping her mother and the horrors of her life.

Katelyn looked at her reflection in the mirror mounted on her dresser. She looked horrible. Her clear green eyes were bloodshot and puffy from crying. Her face was red, except for the area around her left eye, which was an ugly yellowish purple hue, a healing black eye that Janet had given her the week before.

Katelyn picked up her brush and ran it through her short, blonde hair. She wiped the tears off her cheeks and sniffed loudly. Then she changed into a pair of boxers and a large T-shirt and flopped down on her bed. She reached over and turned on her CD player and hit the play button. Moments later, "Larger Than Life", by the Backstreet Boys began to play. Katelyn lay on her bed, singing along softly to the music and looking around her pale blue and white bedroom. She caught sight of one of her Bsb posters and smiled sadly at it. "You guys are the only thing keeping me going," she whispered.

Katelyn felt like this was true. She was seventeen years old and had been abused by her mother ever since she was thirteen, when her father had died. When Katelyn was younger, she had had a good life. Her parents loved each other and seemed to love her. They rarely fought with each other and did things together. Katelyn had loved both of her parents, but she was especially close to her father. She was "Daddy's little princess". But then came the horrible night when her father didn't come home from work. She remembered the horrible visit by a police officer late at night, telling Janet that her husband had been killed in a head-on collision.

Since then, things had never been the same. Janet had completely snapped. She began abusing Katelyn, verbally at first, then physically. Katelyn grew to hate the woman she had once looked up to and loved. She longed an escape from her broken life, but never told anyone about her problems. She was too afraid of what her mother would do to her.

So, for four years, she had been in a living hell. When she was thirteen, in seventh grade, things had gotten so bad, she thought about committing suicide. At first, she pushed the thoughts from her mind, knowing she would be too afraid to actually go through with it. But the summer before she went into eighth grade, things had gotten so bad that she began to seriously consider suicide.

However, the fall of eighth grade, 1997, she found something that took her mind off of her troubles. It was a CD, the Backstreet Boys' U.S. debut album. The first time she heard their first single, "Quit Playing Games", on the radio, she fell in love with it. She bought their CD the day it came out and listened to it whenever she could. She spent all her free time, locked in her room, listening to that CD. She grew to love every song on it and knew all the words by heart. Whenever she listened to it, she felt like she was temporarily escaping from her abusive home situation. Their music was what got her through the bad days.

When Katelyn read her first article about the Backstreet Boys, and learned more about them, Brian immediately became her favorite. She had always thought he was the hottest, but when she learned about all that he had been through, he became an inspiration to her.

Since then, she had bought the Backstreet Boys' two European CDs and Millennium. Millennium was her favorite, and she listened to it over and over again. She loved all of the songs on it, but "The One" quickly became her favorite. She felt as if the lyrics were written about her. To her, they were the ones who could make all her sorrows undone.

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