Soleil

She was following them around whenever she met my biological father.

You know, so we kind of grew up with this like sort of hippie mom, but she was super hardworking to get us, you know, keep us safe, keep us in a house.

And I didn't really see a lot of her when I was younger because she was sometimes working two or three jobs at a time.

I was kind of a weird kid.

I was really into reading.

I was reading really scary stuff, and then I would give myself nightmares.

And I think at one point the school librarian called her and was like, you realize your daughter, who's in third grade, is checking out Stephen King and stuff.

And my mom was like, you're not allowed to do that.

Growing up, moving around so much, either I would find myself in places where I just didn't really have any peers or people who shared my interests.

Like, especially like Cheyenne, Wyoming, it's a really small community.

I was like that weird girl at school who, you know, was, I mean, it's not that weird today, but back then it was, it was weird to, you know, sit by yourself and read.

You know, that was kind of hard.

Just kind of, it was a lonely childhood.

It wasn't until I moved to South Carolina that I started to make some friends.

One of my first friends, her name is Vicky.

She introduced me to a couple of the other, I guess we'll call them like alternative girls in the school.

And we all loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And we would like, we all kind of lived in the same apartment complex or like close enough to each other.

And so whenever we weren't at school, you could find us just sort of running around in the woods.

We would pretend that we were slayers or witches.