Prologue - Teresanna
One week before Prom Night, 1988

Sixteen-year-old Teresanna Montesallo smiled as she walked toward the door of the apartment she shared with her mother, her dark eyes glowing with happiness. After three years of pain, her life was finally turning around, and it had all started with the restraining order that her mother had finally placed on her stepfather! For three wonderful months, Teresanna had been able to go to school every day instead of spending her days healing from "Big Daddy Long's" loving attention. Many of the kids at her school had come forward when the story made it's way through the grapevine to offer their sympathies, and she had found herself suddenly popular, never having realized before that it was her own attempts at hiding the truth that had erected barriers between herself and her classmates.

The best thing of all, however, had come to pass that very afternoon. Tom Gormley, whom she had always thought of as one of the nicest guys in school, had asked her to the Junior/Senior Prom. She hurried up to the door with her key in hand, eager to tell her mother, thinking only that her mother had anticipated her return when the door pushed open before the key was fully in the lock. As she pushed the door the rest of the way open, she called out "Hey Mom, guess what?" - and stopped with a gasp, unable to believe what she was seeing.

Linda Montesallo-Long lay on the living room carpet, bleeding profusely from her ears and nose as her face swelled and darkened, the bruises combining into one huge, purple mask. As Teresanna took another step forward, a wheezing laugh that sent shivers down her spine at its familiarity came from her right. She turned to look in that direction just as a fist came her way. Seeing it just a split second too late to avoid it completely, she dodged to one side and caught the blow on her cheek and shoulder instead of on the nose. Spun off-balance, she stumbled back, wondering distantly how long it would take to recover this time, and found herself suddenly bursting with renewed hope as the sound of sirens reached her.

"They're on their way, Big Daddy. Our new neighbors were once abused women, and they know what to do when a little weasel like you invades the hen house and starts beating on one of their own."

Teresanna didn't know if this was fact or not, but she was willing to lie if it meant sending Big Daddy running for cover, despite her mother's insistence on always telling the truth. The sirens got louder, and Big Daddy's lips curled back to reveal his large front teeth, whose irregular spacing beneath his long, thin nose gave him a rat-like appearance. His small, black eyes peered at her with sheer hatred from beneath his disheveled shock of black hair, and then he was moving toward the door, his hand snaking out as he went past to tangle in her thick, chocolate-brown locks and snap her head around so that her eyes were forced to meet his.

"Wherever you go, I'll find you, because no matter what you and that bitch you call Momma may think, you're MINE!"

His liquor-tainted breath touched her face, making her want to retch, and his mouth covered hers in a sloppy semblance of a lusting kiss, producing nothing but hatred in his stepdaughter's heart. Then he was suddenly gone, leaving his unwashed odor in the air and his rancid taste on Teresanna's lips. With utter revulsion, she wiped at her mouth as she hurried over to the phone in the kitchen to make sure an ambulance really DID come for her mother.

With the calm sureness that came from three years of practice, she gave the address to the operator, then quietly hung up the phone and slipped back to her mother's side. Even after seeing her mother in bad shape uncountable times before, Teresanna could never remember seeing Linda's ears bleed, and she worried that Big Daddy had finally gone too far. Rocking back and forth, unable to do anything for her mother but pray, her eyes suddenly focused on the small metal box under the edge of the couch where all their important papers were kept.

As if drawn by a force outside of herself, Teresanna got her mother's keys off the kitchen table and unlocked the box, pulling out the envelope that held both her Birth Certificate and her Social Security card. She thought long and hard about going into Linda's purse for a driver's license, but decided that would never do, even if there was the vaguest chance of getting a car. Her mother was very obviously Caucasian, with big blue eyes and pale ivory skin. Teresanna showed the influence of her Asian father in her brown, almond-shaped eyes and olive skin tone. The only things the two women had in common were their small size and soft, chocolate-brown hair. Trained well by the fists that had pummeled her for leaving even a pen in the wrong place when she was done with it, Teresanna re-locked the box and returned the keys to the table where she'd found them.

Running into the apartment's one bedroom, she dumped her school books out of her backpack and quickly threw in some clean clothes, slipping the envelope inside as well so it wouldn't get lost. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the doorbell sounded, then forced herself to take a deep, calming breath as she realized that the red flashes that lit the room meant that the ambulance had arrived..

Tossing her backpack over her shoulder, she hurried out to open the door, hovering anxiously close as her mother was lightly and quickly bandaged, then loaded carefully onto the gurney. Grabbing her mother's purse and keys last-minute, she followed the paramedics out to the ambulance, where a police officer gently herded her into his car so that he could hear what happened on the way to the hospital while allowing the paramedics the extra room necessary to work on Linda.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, the officer had a fair idea of what happened and had called it in over the car's radio, putting out an APB on one Mark "Big Daddy" Long. In return, he had been assigned to protect the one witness to the deed until re-enforcements could be dispatched, and didn't seem to be too upset at the idea of protecting the very young, but already exotically pretty brunette from her abusive stepfather.

Teresanna was smoothly polite to her assigned guard, but spent most of her time in the waiting room trying to decide what to do if, as she feared, this beating was too severe for her mother to recover from it. Plan after plan was thought of and rejected as she tried to come up with a place where Big Daddy wouldn't be able to find her, but where she wouldn't need money to go. She was having no luck at all until she looked over at her so-called "protector" and saw an advertisement on the back page of the newspaper he was reading.. It was for "Amateur Night" at a local strip club, and announced the grand prize in big, bold letters. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough to see her to the next city, where there just might be another "Amateur Night" and another grand prize. Part of her argued that Big Daddy just might go into a strip club and see her, but then another part of her, a deeper instinct that had preserved her more than once, insisted that he would be far too busy following police cars around and looking in all the places she had already rejected to ever think of looking for his errant stepdaughter in a strip club. This was especially true since that same stepdaughter refused to even wear a one-piece bathing suit in front of him without having extra clothes over it, fearful of the leeringly hungry gazes he tossed her way more and more as she developed from a bone-thin, flat-chested girl to a small, trim, yet well-rounded young woman..

By the time the doctor came out to tell Teresanna that her mother was in a coma and showing no normal brain wave activity, Teresanna's path was clear.. She would go to the home of a computer-geek friend she had never mentioned to Big Daddy, a boy who had bragged about forging himself an ID with the help of his computer and his mom's home office equipment so he could go into bars at 17. He had once looked at the black eye she was trying to pass off as an accident on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night and offered to make minor changes to her Birth Certificate and Social Security card so she could "escape". At that time, she had angrily turned him down, her pride stung by the fact that he had so easily seen through her lie, but she thought he might still be willing to help her if she apologized and asked for his help.

She would start by making herself old enough to work in a strip club as well as changing her name to make it harder for Big Daddy to find her, especially since her given name wasn't a common one. Disowned by her well-to-do parents for having a child out of wedlock, Linda Montesallo had named her half-Asian daughter for her maternal and paternal grandmothers, Teresa Wadsworth and Anna Montesallo. It was the first time that Teresanna found fault with that touch of sentimentality, and she would now have to get used to being called something entirely different in order to stay hidden.

With any luck, she would win that contest and get out of town before Big Daddy finished making the rounds of her known friends and started checking on anyone who had ever been to school with her. If she wasn't lucky, she'd probably end up sharing her mother's fate for daring to slip away from the dubious "protection" of the ones who were supposed to make sure that Big Daddy obeyed the restraining order.

Escorted to a "safe house" by the police officer, Teresanna pretended to make herself comfortable and even managed to doze briefly.. Her eyes popped open just as everything got quiet, and she listened for a long time to the policeman who had been left to watch her snoring in his chair, almost deciding that her plan was suicide. With a deep sigh, she collected her bag and slipped silently out the window and into the darkness, disappearing into the shadows with only one regret. She didn't tell her mother goodbye.