Amanda was an average teenage girl from Tennessee. Silky blonde hair that danced with the wind, a slender physique, blemishes of adolescence on her delicate white skin and blue eyes that mocked the beauty of the oceans.

The shy and timid little girl had moved in from Kansas a few months ago with her father, who wanted to leave the place where his wife died. He wanted to leave everything that reminded him of her behind and start a new life.

It was a fine Sunday morning. The weather was nice and warm. Amanda had gone looking for her father’s tools in the barn when she found her step-mother‘s corpse lying inside. Her throat was slit and the hay-stack on which her body lay was drenched in her blood.

Amanda’s shrill, bone-chilling scream caught her father’s attention right before he was about to crank start the harvester behind the barn. He ran inside and found his daughter lying unconscious at the foot of his murdered wife, her skin moist with sweat. Cops arrived at the scene with their canines to investigate and track the murderer.

Months passed by, the killer was still at large, no one knew who he was and why he killed Jenna. Wally could no longer deal with her death and began losing his sanity. For she was the one who stood by him during his worst times. She was his strength when his first wife deserted him while Amanda was still an infant.

He would come home drunk each night and behave erratically with his daughter. Scenes from that fateful morning would come back to haunt him every other day and kill him from within, bit by bit, every single time. His bedroom door would often open to shards of broken glass, shattered bottles of whiskey and partly smoked cigarettes lying on the wooden floor. His blood stained the floor whenever he stepped on one of the shards in his drunken stupor.

This continued until the local priest advised him one day to leave town and start afresh. He chose to speak to Wally when he was most sober and with a good amount of effort, managed to coax him to follow his advice.

Amanda found it difficult to blend in with the others at her new school. Not a single day passed by without feeling alienated. The other kids took ample advantage of her calm and shy demeanor and spared no opportunity to bully her. In all the months she spent in the Tennessee public school, she did not make a single friend. Much like back in Kansas, she was all alone here as well. Often cornered, bullied, jeered and sneered.

But back in Kansas, her father was there to comfort her and stand up for her. Her step-mother was not quite interested in being the mother Amanda needed. Her father, however, always played his part.

But that part of him was lost somewhere in that barn where his wife was found dead. It’s true that he now began gaining control over his alcoholism and was slowly walking towards sobriety. But it was a long and slow journey, a rocky road full of sharp turns and blind corners. He kept walking, struggling, falling and rising.

But Amanda never got the comfort that she needed from him, all she got was far fetched advice on standing her ground and giving those bullies a piece of her mind.

One evening, Amanda was back home earlier than usual. Her father saw something had changed. She was not as depressed as she usually was when she got back. She looked as if a great burden was off her shoulders. She looked happy, she looked liberated. He could see it in her eyes. He was intrigued. “Well someone looks happy today, for a change!” he remarked.

Amanda took a can of soda from the refrigerator, sat beside her father on the couch, looked at him and smiled. Wally was more surprised now. “Now that’s something new! I’ve never seen you so happy before, especially after school! What changed?” he asked.

“You know Max and his friend Donny tried to corner me today, again!” She said.

“Those bullies?”

“Yeah! Don’t know what kind of fun they get by doing that! Anyways, so they tried to do what they always do. And I stopped them!”

“Look at you! Standing your ground against a bunch of bullies!” Wally exclaimed.

“Well I just gave them a piece of my mind, just like you always told me to!” Amanda said, with a wicked smile across a face as she opened the can of soda. “Now I’ll never hear from them again!” she proudly said.

Wally was now curious about what his daughter did that silenced the bullies for good. “What did you do Amanda…?” He asked.

She looked at him briefly. “I’ll show you!” she said and reached out for her bag.

Later that night, a woman in her late 50’s driving along Highway 41A in her 1956 Chevy pickup spotted a young girl with a backpack walking along the road near Bedford County. The dim light from the truck’s headlamps caught the girl’s attention. She turned around and gestured for a lift. The old woman pulled up close to the girl. “I’m lost. I was on a bus to Kentucky with my friends. I went to use the ladies room and the bus left without me. Can you take me to Kentucky?” the girl asked the woman. “Sure my dear! You’re lucky I’m on my way to Kentucky too! Hop in! I’ll take you there!” the woman said as she gladly opened the door of her truck.

Bodies of two teenage boys were found in the detention room of the school that Amanda went to. Their throats were slit with a sharp knife. CCTV footage showed a young slender blonde girl getting cornered by the two boys before she went on a rampage, pulling out a knife from her bag and killing the boys with one sweep of her arm. She briefly looked at the camera before she turned around and wiped the blood off the knife on one of the boys’ shirt and walked out of the room.

Cops who went looking for the girl found her father lying lifeless on the couch in the living room. His throat was also cut the same way and his terrified eyes were still open when the cops found his body.

The girl was missing. Medicines prescribed for Dissociative Identity Disorder were found in her dresser drawer, none of them had a broken seal. The murder weapon was nowhere around. The cops swung their flashlights around, gazing across the vast farmland, wondering where the little girl might have ran off to.

She was long gone. She left her timid, sad and shy self behind. She left all those who jeered and sneered. She left the false comfort of her empty house. She left the tender cage she was in. And then she never looked back…