Hi. I am the brother/dad figure to a girl that is 15 years old. I love her probably more than any other human being that I know. My story has to do with the choices my sister decides to make and how they affect me. At fifteen, she is becoming her own person and experimenting with things that I don't necessarily approve of. But I'm not her father, and it's less effective, or appropriate, for me to tell her the things that she may or may not do. I know that she goes to parties where there is drinking. And I know that when she goes to these parties, she drinks. I also know that despite the warnings that I've given her and my emphatic proclamations on the dangers of being in a car driven by someone who's been drinking, that she has done that as well. I was once fifteen and I can remember the absolute certainty I had that I knew everything. That I understood the way the world worked. That the choices I made were undeniably the right choices. I see this quality in my sister.
She has no idea how frightening the world can be. How, in an eye's blink, life as she knows it could completely change. She doesn't grasp yet that line between what is safe and what is chaos is as thin as a strand of hair. She doesn't understand how drastically her choices affect the people that love her. And they do. They do, they do.
--Cale, Phoenix