Chapter 2Then: Loren
Tough Enough: A Life in Moving Pictures (excerpt)
Three months before I escaped, I told my best friend, “If you ever get to school on Monday and I’m not there, it means I finally ran away.” He pretended to believe me, even though we were sitting under the bleachers and he’d just seen the latest marks my mother’s husband put on me. I was sore, shivering a little because it was midwinter, trying to stay tough. Doing my best to believe I finally ran away was a more likely outcome than he finally killed me.
There was a minute, back when I was twelve or so, before he got smart, when somebody might have stopped him. He took after me with the belt, and my Phys Ed teacher saw my back. I’ll never know exactly how hard they looked into it, but I do know someone called the hou
