Summer in the Badlands: A Girl, a City, and a Life

By Sarah Rios

Life is a roller coaster, and no one knows that better than Summer.

After escaping an abusive home at fourteen, Philadelphia native Summer finds a home with a motherly drug-dealer. Nightmares torment her in her sleep, while remorse plagues her when she awakens. Wracked with guilt over abandoning her younger siblings, Summer is determined to make money to free them from the life she fled. But dangerous choices make for a dangerous life—a lesson she learns quickly.

Throughout her life, Summer experiences love—and loss—in all its forms. Friends, family, and lovers change. Happiness quickly shatters into heartbreak. Hopelessness is resolved by fortune. Despite the horrors she witnesses and the bad luck that befalls her, Summer perseveres. Will tragedy and betrayal finally break her? Or can Summer rise above it all to make a better life for herself and her family?

Trying to overcome an abusive childhood, Summer suffers several tragedies and betrayals, each more heartbreaking than the last.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796016550

Sarah Rios

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Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Rios.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019901875

ISBN:                      Hardcover                  978-1-7960-1625-3

                                Softcover                    978-1-7960-1626-0

                                eBook                         978-1-7960-1655-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/16/2019

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Two days after my thirtieth birthday, my mother died. She was only 44 years old.

The math here is obvious, but I’ll clarify anyway—she had me when she was only 14. Her death hit me hard for a lot of reasons and not all of them flattering to her. But what her death did do, was really make me sit back and consider her life. And more, it made me consider mine.

No one can ever fully escape their childhood, it makes our foundation. Mine was rocky. I know my mom never meant for that to be the case. She did the best she could—but looking back now, she was so young when she started it all and, in the end, she just got in over her head.

At fourteen, when she found out she was pregnant, there weren’t a lot of solutions for her. Her family and she were highly religious, as was my father’s family. So, she made the best choice she knew how to make. She got married.

Really everything went okay for 11 years. And at least those first years of my childhood were solid. I learned a lot from her then, about diligence and effort as well as about love. She went back to school and got her G.E.D. then went and got a training to become a dental assistant. During this time, she and my dad had me and then four more children. They loved us—she loved us. That’s what made the descent that came after so difficult.

When I was 11 years old my father divorced my mother—he wasn’t content with the life he’d built so young. He wanted more. My mother couldn’t understand this; she loved my father unconditionally. Despite getting married so young she never looked outward to want anything else. She wanted a happy family and he wanted other women, so he left, and she fell apart.

Looking back, she was only 24 at the time. I didn’t see that back then, she was my mother and I was looking for protection and love. But, really, she was barely more than a child herself and the strain of losing my father was more than she knew how to take.

My mother began going out to clubs and bars and hanging around with anyone who could validate her. Unfortunately, these people also introduced her to something else that made her feel even better than their validation could, cocaine.

The ensuing addiction was so bad it changed every aspect of the person she was. When my mother was on the cocaine it made her forget the pain. She became numb and she felt happy and beautiful again. This became the only thing that drove her day to day life. She didn’t care anymore about the duties of motherhood that once meant so much to her. She was rarely home, our house was always a wreck, there was no food in the fridge, our clothes didn’t get washed, etc..

Without her supervision, or father’s, my siblings and I barely went to school. Mom might have been young, but we were children and that is the hard part to forgive. It’s hard to look back and not blame her for the lice that anyone could visibly see walking along my sisters’ scalps. Or blame her that I had to learn to be the adult because she wouldn’t.

My father wasn’t any help. He was too busy regaining his own lost youth to concern himself with the five kids and the woman he left behind. Without either of them looking over me, I ran the streets at all hours of the day and night. No one even knew I was gone. I was free to do whatever my little heart desired.

By the time I was 14, I stayed up all night, got high on weed, and drank liquor. I would take the money that I earned to buy my siblings food. Even though Mom got food stamps, she just changed them for money and used that to buy drugs. The little I pulled in wasn’t enough to support us. Neighbors would give us food. Even with that, we spent many nights without electricity or gas or sometimes even water.

The worst part looking back, wasn’t that Mom slipped, or even that father left. It was that all the people who should have been there to catch them and help support us if they failed, failed us too. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to feel like I was a part of something. A family. But even though we had a lot of extended family who claimed to be god-loving and giving, they never helped. I often wonder if my mom could have recovered if they’d been there for her. Or if my siblings and I would have had an easier childhood if they’d just stepped in. Even as I was getting into a lot of trouble, no one in my family seemed to see this as a red flag. They just yelled and said I wouldn’t amount to nothing. Words that can stay with a child for years.

They knew what was going on. If one of my sisters was ever floundering like that, I’d