Editor’s note: The following is part two of a two-part series.
Sitting in the “Signature Cafe” of a Portland Safeway, under a set of pseudo-fancy lights, I watched Amanda Peterson and a friend walk in with a pair of chubby-cheeked bundles of joy.
Amanda, wearing a gray sweatshirt and black sweatpants, grabbed her coffee and eased into her seat, placing her baby’s veiled car seat right beside her.
It had been almost four years since I had last seen Amanda.
As we talked about her chaotic and heart-wrenching past, (often interrupted by the chuckles and excited squeals of her friend’s baby) she briefly stopped to lift up the pink blanket draped over the car seat; unveiling a soft, squishy little girl who gently locked eyes with me for almost a minute.
Amanda points to her in light of her two years of pain and says, “I got a blessing out of it.”
She put on that radiating smile I remember so well…
After slipping out the back door and escaping her enraged father, Amanda and her lover fled on foot towards a nearby friend’s house. Old Jack-Rabbit Robbie was on the run again, from the police and now Amanda’s family.
A love-struck Amanda was right in the action. She didn’t know where she’d end up — she just knew she wanted to be somewhere she was loved, somewhere she fit in. Robbie was that beckoning call for her, she thought.
They arrived to their destination shortly, and after telling their friend that they needed to skip town, they were off to Beaver Creek City, Oregon (aka the middle of nowhere).
“We just booked, we just left … we disappeared,” said Amanda. Their friend hooked Robbie up with some meth and he smoked it right in front of her when they got to Beaver Creek.
She’d never seen meth before. She thought it was a form of weed.
He convinced her that he was in complete control of his situation. He was, you know, a casual meth user, only doping in stressful situations.
Watching him use those drugs marked the death of Robbie as she knew him. From then on, he was a monster.
He would use drugs with bunches of other people and she would be the only sober one in the house. He would call her a “little girl” and take advantage of her naivety.
He forced her to re-live her childhood; she was again the outcast.  
Robbie never let her try meth. She would watch as everyone tweaked out and her naive curiosity only grew.
After being in Beaver Creek for a while, they grew paranoid and fled to Woodburn. It was here that she begged Robbie to let her try it. She was just tired of not fitting in. Tired of being a little girl.
“He would make me feel two inches tall,” Amanda said.
She persuaded him to actually let her try. Everyone else was high, so she didn’t want to be sober.
He gave her the nod. She took her first hit.
The tweaking. The paranoia. The fidgeting. She felt them all — but Robbie and his friends all fell asleep.
“So I’m up all night, high — again, the oddball,” Amanda said. Getting high eventually became her way of muting out all the pain she felt; she was running from everyone she loved.
From there, her and Jack-Rabbit Robbie bounced all around Oregon, fleeting randomly with growing paranoia and taking hit after hit with the addiction growingand growing.
It wasn’t until that fateful night where Robbie was arrested that she was reconnected with family and friends.
Robbie was sent to rehab, but being the slippery fellow he is, escaped it when he was told Amanda couldn’t visit him. He was brought back shortly.
Amanda found out she was pregnant just two weeks after he told her he wanted nothing to do with her. She returned to her parents’s house and cut off everyone.
She spent those next months drowning in sorrow with the baby’s birth growing closer and closer. It only made it worse when she found out that Robbie already had a new girlfriend.
“Every kick I felt (from the baby), I cried a little more,” she said.
Little Hailey was born on March 25th. She saved Amanda’s life: forcing her to quit smoking cigarettes and stop using drugs. She is now back in school and has nothing to do with Robbie — her worst addiction.
“It was a lot easier to get away from the drugs than him,” Amanda sternly stated with a small smirk on her face.
That is the girl I once remembered — a naive little girl, turned adverse-young-mom.
[email protected]