The Bronson File

Eventually I was taken out of my High School and enrolled in the school for "troubled" kids because of my running away as a teenager. I was in the second semester of the 11th grade when this took place. My attendance was terrible, my grades were even worse. I had given up on school, friends, grades and everything in general other than taking care of myself. Some would say I was depressed - but in a secret reality, I was going through withdrawals.



I was put on ritalin against the Doctors orders at the age of four and a half. By the time I was fifteen, I knew that I didn't like how it made me feel. I stopped taking them all together. Mom started counting the pills every day, so I started flushing them down the toilet. I didn't know what withdrawals were, but I felt like wearing black every day. I went through terrible mood swings where I would lash out for no apparent reason. I would often get angry and scream at my parents for the smallest things. I never got away with that, though.



Convinced I was on drugs (when really I had taken myself off of drugs) my parents started taking me to shrinks on the military base. They prescribed Klonopin, Paxil, Prozac and a myriad of other mind and emotion numbing drugs. I refused to take those, too. I flushed them down the toilet every day, right along side the Ritalin.



One night I got into trouble for something. I don't even remember what it was. I was told to go down to my room while my parents discussed the punishment. Wanting desperately to show them exactly what the drugs would do to me if I ever actually took them, I took only one tablet of Klonopin. Even I didn't know what the effects would be. By the time I was to report upstairs for the punishment, my eyes were fully dialated. The suspicions only grew. They had me pegged as being a dope fiend and searched my bedroom that night for any illegal narcotics. The only things they found were the things they were trying to force me into taking. It worked just as I had wanted to. They got off of my case about drugs. They still wanted me to take my prescriptions just before bedtime so nobody saw my dialated eyes, but I still refused. I continued to flush them down each day, or grind them into dust and sprinkle them in the yard. There were a few happy birds flitting around for a while when I did that.



At the alternative school I started to run into people I hadn't seen in a few years. I had gone to school with some kids in Jr High that suddenly disappeared, much the way I did in the 11th grade. Of course I had few friends the entire time I lived in Utah, so I was used to spending my time alone. That suddenly changed at my new school. All of the Social Outcast kids banned together. We didn't pick on one another no matter what our ailments were. The kid with Coke Bottle glasses was treated with equal dignity as the girl with head gear (me) and the former Football player, kicked out of his school for trying Steroids. We were all equals, standing on equal turf. Nobody was better than anyone else. I was in heaven.



At Washington High, I was voted "Sweetest Girl" in the school, and my dear friend Trent Heckman was voted "Sweetest Guy" so our photo was taken for the year book. I had friends who talked to me in each class. I had teachers that would treat me like an equal instead of like a plague. I didn't realize for a long time what the core difference was between Washington and Bonneville, but when it dawned on me, it hit like a ton of bricks. We weren't Mormon.



We came from all walks of life. We were a collection of Catholics, Methodist, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and a variety of other religions. The teachers were as well. We were Military kids, mostly - brought together in the middle of Ogden, Utah because of the simple reason that we were of a different religion.



I've always been a part of the Majority. To have suddenly been thrust into a Minority group because of the church my family went to (or rather, didn't go to) didn't make sense to me. I learned how to cope with it quickly enough though. I made friends all over my school and became one of the most popular kids there. Nobody made fun of me anymore, people asked me for help on English assignments, teachers praised me and my attendance became legendary.



I ended up making friends with a Bronson Babbit after a couple of months. I had known Bronson for a little while in the 7th grade, but like so many I knew, he suddenly disappeared. It turned out that they had moved, and later on was forced to go to Washington like all the rest. He had been a bit of a nerd boy when I knew him before, but I didn't even know who he was when he called out my name in the hallway one day.



"Amanda," he said, "is that you?"



"Yeah, do I know you?"



"It's me. Bronson."



"Bronson who?"



"Bronson Babbit. 7th grade."



He brushed his long hair out of his face, curled his upper lip into a snarling smile, and squinted slightly. Instantly I knew who he was, even with the eye liner and sweat band bracelets.



The very next time I ran away from home after being violently attacked by my mother in the parking lot of the school, I went to Bronson's house. That time I had decided to take my dog Cookie with me. She was such a lovely dog, I couldn't just leave her behind. My parents had threatened to get rid of her if I ran away again. I refused to let anything happen to her. I smuggled her on the city bus by sticking her inside a duffle bag and carrying her like I would a suitcase full of clothes. She never made a sound.



Bronson's family were kind to me. They lived in a small trailer in a Mobile Home court and were fine with me bringing Cookie with me. She got along with Bronson's mother very well and becamse a member of the family very quickly.



The family lived off of Hamburger Helper at almost every meal. They were all fairly heavy set, including Bronson, but their hearts were good and they took care of me. I was free to come and go as I pleased and continued going to school each day. My attendance remained steady, never missing a class.



Finally, and quite suddenly, Bronson's family had to move and I was forced to move on alone. Without anywhere else to go, I finally made the long trek home to my mother and father. I hated no having options.



Cookie was happy to see my mother, but I certainly wasn't. They had cleaned out my room, getting rid of everything I owned except for a mattress on the floor and the clothes I was wearing. I didn't even have a door on my bedroom anymore.



That started another jouney for me - one that would take me over a state border and over 600 miles from home... but that's another story. That's the story of Byron Miller, a story I've never told to another living soul. I'm not proud of it and I did a terrible thing, but I'm ready to tell the truth.



Stay tuned.

The Rabbit Grass Patch

In the beginning of the 6th grade, I was a bit of a loner. That all changed later on in the year, but that's another story.

Rashaad Sampson used to pick on me out in the school yard. I would find a quiet spot in the back corner of the playground when I retired from the Bars and would sit on a very soft patch of grass I called Rabbit Grass, since it felt to me like a bunny's back. Eventually I made a friend though, and Megan McKinley would sit under the same tree with me.

Kristen Osterthalen had written a play that the class would be performing later on that year. Inspired by her and my own desire to write, Megan and I decided to write a play of our own. We would sit in the back of the playground on that patch of Rabbit Grass and write. We would talk for the entire recess about what we wanted to write into our play.

Rashaad found us back there one day and asked what we were doing. Neither of us wanted to answer, so we ignored him for a while. Eventually he was the reason Megan and I developed our own version of sign language. We had hand signals for everything. We even created our own written language thanks to a class assignment that blossomed for us. For years I could read and write fluently in that private language. Though I would struggle with a couple of the letters now, I still have most of the memorized.

Rashaad started picking handfuls of my Rabbit Grass and throwing them at us. He was tired of being ignored. He chanted at us about what big nerds we were to have our own language. He teased us until we couldn't ignore him anymore. Back then I never stood up for myself (some things never change) so Megan did. As I sat there picking my precious grass out of my long hair, Megan stood up and told Rashaad off. She told him that he needed to leave us alone, we weren't bothering him, and surely a kid of 5'10 in the 6th grade had better things to do with his time, like pick apples without a ladder.

What Rashaad didn't know was that secretly I had a crush on him. I had long since forgotten about Mike from the 5th grade after playing Blind Man's Bluff with him. I was far more crushed than I let on.

When I got home from school that day I started to tell my Mom all about how Rashaad had thrown grass at me. I was so upset that I started to cry and couldn't get the word "grass" to come out of my mouth through the sobs.

" Rashaad was so mean to me! He.... (sob) was thr... (sob) thr... throwing .... (sob) Grass at me!"

My mother started to laugh at me, to which I cried harder. It wasn't funny at all! He had really hurt my very delicate feelings! Still, she saw humor in there somewhere. Her next remark really blew me away.

"Don't worry, Honey... when he gets to know you better, he'll throw rocks!"

First Date

I was a teen run away.

I started at 16 years old and never really stopped until a few years ago. Finally, after spending almost half of my life running from the monster under the bed, I got tired of it. I ended the pattern with a new approach to life in general. It was a gradual change, I suppose. Though to me it seems to have happened almost over night, almost like I simply... woke up.

The first time I ran away, I was only 15 years old. My parents were coming down on me really hard and accusing me of things I had never even thought of doing. I had been accused of being on drugs since I was 13 years old and didn't even know what marijuana looked like. By the time I was 15 all of my parents friends thought I was sleeping around with anyone and everyone. In reality, I was still a virgin. More than once my mother threatened to take me to the doctors to verify that fact, but my parents never followed through with that threat. I wish they had.

I stayed with a male friend of mine the first time I ran away. He lived just down the street and his mom was out of town for a couple of weeks. I stayed in his room and he slept on the couch during that time. I always thought that was very kind of him. I had a huge crush on him at the time, but that never became an issue. We never so much as held hands. I knew what people would say and think if it became common knowledge, so we did what we had to in order to prevent people from finding out. That was the moment I knew I could trust Steve with my life.

I was working at Wendy's in Roy, Utah at the time. It was easily 3 miles from Steve's house, and I walked to work every single day while I stayed with him. I would work my entire shift, then turn around and walk back down the hill toward my temporary home. For the first time in my life, I felt a taste of freedom and I loved it. I couldn't imagine life any other way, and from that moment on, that was all I wanted. I wanted to have a chance to go to work and go home, to take care of myself, come and go as I pleased and know that I never once had to sacrifice my morals in order to accomplish my day to day life.

One night while working the change window at the Wendy's drive thru, a guy from school came in to the restaurant. He knew that I looked familiar and asked which school I went to. Right off the bat I knew who he was. I was amazed he even looked my direction. The Libby's were popular kids in school, and I was scum in the bottom of the tank of small fish in the big school. When he asked for my phone number and invited me to go play miniature golf, I thought it must be a joke!

We had a glorious time that night. We played miniature golf for the first time in my life. We stayed out until around 9:30 at night and then went over to his cousins house, where we sat in a group of 5, watching a favorite Disney movie. I was tired from work though and ended up falling asleep on the couch, my head leaned back against a very soft pillow. When Andrew woke me up later on to drive me home, I was incredibly embarrassed that I had fallen asleep in the first place.

I kissed Andrew on the cheek and for some reason I expected a call from him the next day. The call didn't come that day or the next. Nor did it come the next week, and by the time I had gone back home to my parents, I had all but forgotten about Andrew. I could only think that perhaps he didn't have fun with me, or he simply didn't like me.

When school started back up, I passed Andrew in the hallway one day. I said hello, he looked in my direction and simply nodded. He didn't say hello, he didn't smile. He didn't even really seem to recognize me at all! I was crushed. I had actually had a lot of fun, and Andrew Libby was my first date.

There's a strange unspoken rule still very much alive in the small town in which I lived. I wasn't a part of the religion, and I wasn't willing to convert. To many people (not all, but many) that was like having a swastika tattooed on my forehead. Andrew Libby found out somehow that I wasn't a member of the same religion, and because of that simple fact, was told not to speak to me again.

Steve remained my best friend for many years. When the world turned its back on me, he was my brother. When things went well for me, he was there to pat me on the back. There were times that Steve was more of a family to me than my own family was. I'll always love Steve for that.

Steve's little brother was another story though... Dan and I were involved in Breaking and Entering a private property. But that's another story.

Camp Thousand Pines

I think I was in the 5th grade when I went to Camp Thousand Pines for the first time. I remember pulling up in the bus and having all the girls in one group, the boys in the other. It had been a hard year in school for me that year, having just lost my best friend, Louise Pritchard, when she moved away. I've never stopped looking for her.

The bus pulled up in one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. Little cabins were dotted through the woods with a central hall in the dead center of it all. The kids all piled out and began to scatter in multiple directions before one of the teachers bellowed for them all to freeze where they were and reassemble by the bus.

One by one we received cabin assignments. There was a teacher or parent in each cabin, but that didn't stop the girls from giggling and the boys from trying to pull practical jokes on one another at night. Parts of the trip turned out like the practical joke events in the original "Parent Trap" movie.

We went on night hikes. We met the local Native American tribe and they came to teach us how to do the traditional Rain Dance. I discovered my allergic reaction to bees. I had a metal ladder fall on my leg and sprain my ankle and we all took turns in the kitchen preparing a meal for the other kids before taking any food for ourselves. We even learned how to curl our hands and place our lips in the correct position in order to call the squirrels. I can actually still do it.

We told ghost stories out by the fire at night, roasted marshmallows over the open flames and enjoyed root beer floats while chatting about life in general. Though it seems as if Camp Thousand Pines has changed a lot since I was last there, my memories of the place before technology, live on just as they were.

Boo Hag - a Ghost Story.

You know how they say some folks are lucky at cards and some are lucky at love? Well, that fit Bobby Hansen to a ‘T’. He was the best poker player in the county, but somehow he couldn’t find himself a bride. Oh, he proposed to several girls, and even got accepted by a few. But they always got cold feet a day or two before the wedding, and it was bye-bye Bobby.

After the third time, Bobby was mighty discouraged, and his Pa felt real sore for him. They worked together in the family grocery store, and Bobby would sometimes sit on top of the pickle barrel and tell his Pa all his woes. And his Pa told him to hang in there, because a nice lady was on her way. Neither of them believed it, but it made both of them feel better to hear it said. Well, the day after their latest talk, the old woman who poled her barge through the swamp to deliver milk and eggs to the grocery store had a long talk with Bobby’s Pa. Seems she had this daughter who was hankering after a husband with a good steady job, and the old woman thought Bobby would do the job nicely. She suggested they introduce the pair at the next dance, and Bobby’s Pa agreed.

The night of the dance, Bobby’s Pa insisted that his son dress in his best. Bobby was dragging his feet a little, remembering all those women who played him false and not wanting to go, but his Pa dragged him out anyway. Well, the moment Bobby clapped eyes on the dark-eyed, red-lipped girl from the swamp, he was head over heels in love. Her eyes sparkled like the sunlight on the bay. Her skin was as creamy as new milk. Her voice was low and sweet.

The pair cuddled and cooed and waltzed the whole night long, and come sunrise Bobby was all for bringing his new love before the visiting priest who delivered his sermons in the grocery store (since there weren’t no church in that vicinity) and getting married right away. Well the girl was willing to get married, but not by a priest.

“Let’s just go to Beaumont and have the judge marry us,” she said to Bobby, and he was so smitten he agreed, though it would have been quicker and easier to just walk a mile down the road to see the priest.

By the next evening they were wed, and Bobby brought his pretty bride to the nice little cottage he rented just down the road from the family grocery. It had a nice front porch with a swing, a big bedroom on the second floor and a big attic with a window that could be made up into a second guestroom should his new mother-in-law care to visit from her home in the swamp.

After fixing him a nice dinner, Bobby’s new bride sat awhile in the rocking chair near their bed while Bobby yawned and watched her fondly. She cuddled under the blanket and knitted and hummed, and Bobby’s eyes grew heavy. He didn’t wake up until early morning, when his new bride crept into bed all hot and sweaty and fell asleep at once. When he asked her where she’d been, she wouldn’t answer him. Bobby was mighty sore that his bride had snuck out on him on their wedding night, but when she got snappish and her eyes blazed like they did when he questioned her, he grew frightened and backed down.

Life took on an odd pattern for Bobby. During the day, everything was perfect. His wife was sweet and pretty and loving. She kept the house sparkling clean and cooked him wonderful meals. But each night she refused to come to bed after supper. Like their wedding night, she sat up singing and rocking and knitting until he was asleep and did not come to bed til just afore dawn. She was always sweaty and cranky when she came to bed, and went to sleep before Bobby could question her.

Bobby was very confused and upset by this behavior, and finally confided in his Pa one morning after opening up the grocery store. Bobby’s Pa was awful worried. The visiting priest had gone on to his next parish, and there was no one they could consult but the local conjure woman. So he sent Bobby to her with a couple of chickens as a gift.

The conjure woman knew all about hoodoo magic and was an excellent herbalist. Local folks went to her when they were sick, on account of the doctor lived nigh on twenty miles away. When she heard Bobby’s story, she told him to pretend to go to sleep that night and watch what his new bride did. Then he was to come back and tell her everything. Bobby agreed.

The next evening, he pretended to fall asleep while his bride rocked and sang in her chair. Then he followed her up to the attic and watched through the crack in the open door as she sat down at the spinning wheel and spun off her skin, leaving only pulsing red muscles and blue veins. She was a terrifying sight and she sprang through the window and flew away into the night. Bobby ran out to the privy and was sick after he saw her. Who, what was this monster he had married? He was still trembling and in shock when his bride, looking like a normal person again, crept into bed at dawn, and he had trouble behaving normally at breakfast.


Part 2: Video created by a Reader
As soon as he could get away, Bobby ran to the home of the conjure woman and told her about the spinning wheel and the terrible skinless creature who flew away from his attic. “A boo-hag,” the conjure woman said at once. “You’ve married a boo-hag.”

“What’s a boo-hag?” asked Bobby. “A Boo Hag is a witch and a shape-shifter,” said the conjure woman. “She lures men into her trap and then delivers them to her Boo-Daddy, who eats their flesh and gnaws their bones. And that’s what she’ll do to you if you don’t get rid of her first.”

The conjure woman told Bobby to get himself some blue paint. As soon as the boo-hag left the house that night, he was to spread blue paint on every window frame and every door frame and make sure it was two coats thick. A boo-hag couldn’t fly through a window or door that was painted blue. And if she didn’t get back into her skin before dawn, she would be trapped without it, and be revealed for the monster she was. So he was to leave one tiny window unpainted, and keep it open a sliver so the boo-hag could squeeze through. Then he was to fill up her skin with salt and pepper, which would burn her up from the inside out. And Bobby promised to do exactly as the conjure woman said.

That night, Bobby lingered over his dinner, looking with sad eyes at the pretty woman sitting opposite him. He knew she was really a monster inside, but it was so nice to have a little wife in his home. He hated like anything to see her go. But he didn’t want to get eaten by a Boo-Daddy, and that was his fate if she stayed. So he went up to their bedroom and pretended to fall asleep while she rocked and sang and knitted. Then he followed her quietly upstairs and put salt and pepper into her skin after her ugly red-muscled blue-veined figure had flown out the window to her Boo-Daddy. He spent the rest of the night painting over every door and window frame with blue paint, leaving only one small unpainted window open in the cellar. He nailed it up so that it would open no further than a crack, just as the conjure woman instructed him. Then he hid himself behind a large chest of drawers up in the attic to wait for the boo-hag.

Just before dawn, the boo-hag came flying up to the attic window. As soon as she touched the blue frame, she gave a shriek of pain and rage. Bobby listened as she flew around the house, testing each window and door and howling like a banshee when it burned her skinless hands. Then she found the little window in the cellar, and he heard the thump as she landed beside it, followed by a painful whimpering sound as she squeezed and squeezed herself through the narrow opening, her skinless red muscles and blue veins tearing painfully against the rough wood.

The boo-hag ran up three flights of stairs into the attic and squeezed and squeezed into her skin as fast as she could. She just barely got it on when the first light of dawn shone over the horizon. And that was when the salt and pepper did their work, burning the boo-hags body from the inside out. With a scream of agony, she flung herself out the attic window. The glass shattered everywhere as she tried to fly away, tearing at the skin to get it off. But it was too late. She exploded into tiny pieces right over the swamp, and the alligators had them a mighty feast of cooked boo-hag for breakfast that morning.

So Bobby was once again without a wife. But bachelorhood looked much better to him after that, and he never went looking for a wife again. ‘Course, after he made a pile of money in oil, the girls started chasing him. But that’s another story!