Everything that was happening was scary, but the strangest part of the whole thing was, that my mom just acted like it was all perfectly normal. She said that it was just hormonal teenage behavior. Whenever I brought the subject up, she would just laugh and brush it off.

How could she not be worried?

I was freaking out, and at one point I even thought I might have had a mental illness of some kind. I asked her about my dad, who'd left us when I was a baby. I thought maybe schizophrenia or bipolar ran in his family or something, but she just said no and laughed at...