Beatrice Anne Perdue was sixteen years, four months, and three days old and getting ready to celebrate New Year's Eve with her friends at the end of 1985. She was also eight months pregnant. When she woke up that New Year's Eve morning, it was with the plan to go to a party at a friend's house that night and to ring in 1986 together. However, by 6 that evening her water had broke and the contractions were coming on strong. That year, Beatrice rang in the New Year by delivering a 5lb 7 oz baby girl at 1:06 in the morning. Rather than crying tears of joy, the young girl looked at her new baby, who she had named Dusty Rose, and said “I missed a party for this?”
Growing up, Dusty was raised partly by her mother and mostly by her grandparents. Beatrice would show interest on occasion, but for the most part she was still too interested in being a young girl than she was in being a mother. It was Harold and Elizabeth Perdue who provided for Dusty and made sure she had all the things she needed in life. That was, until Dusty was eight. It was in the spring of 1994 that Beatrice married a man she had been dating for less than a year and moved out of her parents house, taking her daughter with her. Though Harold and Elizabeth protested and begged their daughter to leave Dusty with them, Beatrice insisted that she was HER daughter and would therefore be going with her and her new husband.
Life with her mother and step-father was far different for Dusty than life with her grandparents had been. While before she had been doted upon and loved, here she was mostly left to her own devices. There were no more homemade cookies waiting when she got home from school. No more bedtime stories and being tucked in at night. Instead, she would come home from school and make herself a snack while her step-father slept until her mother came home from work at 7. After a quick meal, usually something quick and thrown together, Beatrice and her husband would retire to their bedroom, leaving young Dusty to clean up after them and bathe herself, before putting herself in bed around 8:30 or 9 o'clock. Dusty didn't know what exactly her mother and step-father did when they went to their room, but the walls were thin and there was always a lot of yelling and moaning. From the sounds of things she didn't think it sounded like much fun.
For two long years Dusty had to raise herself. Getting up in the morning and getting herself ready for school. Making her own breakfast and packing her own lunch. Cleaning up around the house in the evenings, while her stepfather slept his life away. At least, that's what he did when Dusty was around. She had no idea what he did while she was in school, nor did she really care. Over time, she did her best to stay away from the house for as long as she could. Most nights she wouldn't come home until it was almost dark out, having gone to play with friends after school or going to the local park. Anything she could think of to stay out of the house. For the most part, it didn't seem like her mother or stepfather cared much.
Things changed for Dusty one afternoon a little over two years after she'd been moved out of the safe and loving environment of her grandparents and gone to live with her mother and stepfather. Dusty had gotten sick at school and her mother had to leave work early and come get her. Walking into the house hours before either Beatrice or Dusty were expected home, they both found out what Dusty's stepfather did while everyone was away. Walking into the house, they had found him in the living room with some strange woman under him, legs in the air and spread wide as he fucked her on the couch. Beatrice had flown into a rage, screaming and yelling and slapping at both her husband and the woman.
With her marriage at an end and nobody else to focus her attention on, Beatrice tried to become a better and more attentive mother, but by then it was too late and the damage of years of raising herself was already done. By the time she was twelve, Dusty was well on her way to becoming a clone of her mother. She was running around the neighborhood until late hours of the night, using language not fitting of a young lady, and though she had yet to have sex...she wasn't exactly chaste, either. More than once she was seen going into a dark alley with one of the neighborhood boys and everyone knew that she was performing oral sex on them. By thirteen she had started smoking and drinking and on the night before her fourteenth birthday, Dusty lost her virginity on a dirty mattress in a warehouse that the local kids often snuck into when they didn't want to get caught doing something.
Throughout her childhood and teenage years there were two people that Dusty could always count on to be there for her, no matter what kind of trouble she was in. open and racklin. She and open had grown up just a few houses away from each other and even after she moved with her mother, they were fortunate enough to still attend the same school together. He was slightly older than her and although he tried to play the cool guy at school and pretend like she was just an annoyance, he always tended to look out for her and wouldn't allow for the other kids to pick on her. He was, in a way, the older brother she had never have. racklin came along later when open met him on the school playground and befriended him. At first Dusty was a little jealous, thinking that she was being replaced in open's life, but she quickly learned that they could all be friends as a group and while she knows that neither boy always agreed with her life choices, she also knows that either one would have her back anytime she needed them.
Though she partied away much of her school career, Dusty always made sure that she kept her grades at least at a passing level. It was very important to her to be able to break away from her mother and move on with her life and she knew education was important for that. By the end of high school Dusty (barely) managed to get accepted to community college, where she proceeded to major in Photography. Though she wasn't entirely sure what she would do with that major once she graduated, it was the only one that appealed to her in any way, shape or form.
One thing that Dusty inherited from her mother was her bad judgment in men. All her life, Dusty floated from one loser to another. Men who used her and men who, although they never outright physically abused her, treated her worse than any woman deserved. They cheated and lied and abused her emotionally.
Following her graduation, she went to work as an assistant to a local photographer. It seemed like the perfect deal...there was an apartment above the studio that she could live in, rent free if she was willing to earn a little less per paycheck, and she would be getting on the job training with the hopes that she would learn enough to one day start her own photography studio. It turned out to be another exercise in poor judgment on her part when she began an intimate relationship with the man she was working for. At first it worked well for them. But in time, as most of her relationships did, it went sour. It became more and more obvious that he was using her for the sex and everything came to a head when one night Dusty and her boss were at the studio late together. What had started out as work had quickly progressed to a steamy encounter, which was cut short by a woman that Dusty had never seen barging in ranting and raving and throwing things at the two of them. As it turned out...her boss had a wife that Dusty had never known about.
It was about that time that Dusty's best friend, racklin, started talking about moving to the United States. With no job, very little money, and no place to live...it hadn't taken much for her to jump on board and agree to go with him when he asked. In what felt like no time at all, she was packing all of her things and shipping them to Georgia. Not long after that she herself was on a plane, armed with a plan to start her own photography studio, and making the trip across the ocean to start a new life.