A kid my age shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of shit.

Their constant bickering and screaming and arguing is enough to send any rational person’s sanity teetering precariously over the edge.

But don’t get me wrong, because it wasn’t always like this.

In fact, I don’t think that any kid could have asked for better parents or a better home. We live in a beautiful suburban neighborhood with other upper-middle class families, where it’s safe and peaceful and uncommonly uneventful. A neighborhood where most kids can walk to school afraid of nothing. A neighborhood where everyone knows each other and is always eager to lend a helping hand.

For the most part, I’ve had an idyllic childhood.

Long days spent in the park, clumsily pitching wayward curve-balls to my father as my mother looked on, smiling as she arranged food on a picnic table under the shade of a broad oak tree.

Fishing trips on the lake in my father’s boat, the one he affectionately named after my my mother. Struggling to bait my lines, then later gleefully reeling in thrashing fish much longer than my arm. (Or so my father would always tell my mother…)

Joyous holidays spent with a house full of aunts, uncles, cousins and two pair of doting grandparents.

Celebrating my thirteenth birthday at Disneyland last year was one of the most amazing experiences of my life! Three days of music, magic, rides and food left me exhausted but eager for more. I truly felt like I was the most important person in the entire world during that trip, the way Mom and Dad catered to my every whim.

I’m not sure exactly when that idyllic childhood morphed into the current hell that has become my home, but I think a lot of it has to do with “that woman” that my mother is always bitching about.

There’s not much that I can do when they get like this. Usually I’ll just pop my iPods into my ears and crank the music up until I’ve drowned them out. But today, it’s worse than usual. I can hear the crashing tinkling of glassware being hurled in the kitchen as my mother screams at the top of her lungs. I can hear my father’s despondent pleas, begging her to just listen for a moment because she’s overreacting about absolutely nothing.

It’s no use, this will probably go on for hours.

I hug my pillow tightly around my head, desperately hoping it will deafen the sound.

Yep, that should muffle the shot from my father’s pistol, I think, before I slowly squeeze the trigger.