My whole life I was taught to be the best. Dad was a schoolteacher and had many demands "I met all of his demands. Throughout my educational career I received straight As. My social life lagged, but I didn't mind much. Marlene, my only good friend though high school, always tried to get me to go to the school dances. I told her I had to study because the work was becoming more difficult. I could only concentrate on school. Soon later, I got a job at a Jack in the Box restaurant. Balancing school and a job was tough, but I knew that wouldn't bring me down "instead it made me stronger. All I wanted was to please my parents; that's how I was raised.
I was completely confident. I even took a calculus test from which I was exempted to prove my capability to Dad. And Mom would wake us all up at 5:30 to swim in the cold pool at the YMCA. I think that's how I got my obsession with water. I spent more of my life in water than out of it. I once swam around an island in Mexico.
Growing up, I was told to succeed no matter what "anything less was unacceptable. I didn't give my parents a chance to complain. I made class valedictorian. They were proud; I could tell they were. I wanted to be a parent like them so my children would turn out like me.
I became a post-op nurse at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I had been a nurse for six years when I met Rusty in 1989. He had spied me sunbathing in a bikini by the pool at the apartment complex we shared. I had never been so bold as on the day I knocked on Rusty's apartment door to ask if he knew who had dinged my car. He didn't, but we talked. Later, I confessed to him that the car was just an excuse for me to meet him. Earlier I had gone alone to a restaurant for steak and I noticed a couple talking intimately and that made me focus my intentions on Rusty. At the apartment complex, I scribbled a note on a torn piece of paper and placed it beneath a wiper of his white Toyota Corolla ""I was thinking maybe you could come by sometime tonight.
