MONSTERS
DON'T
WIN
Author biography
Preston Pilant is a business owner, dog lover, and storyteller who believes survival is an art form. Raised in instability and shaped by hardship, he learned early how to endure — and later, how to rebuild. After founding multiple ventures, facing failure, betrayal, and personal reinvention, he ultimately created a thriving boarding retreat dedicated to providing the kind of safety he once searched for. His writing blends honesty, grit, and reflection, inviting readers into a story of resilience, identity, and reclaiming power. He lives in the country with plenty of land, plenty of dogs, and a deep appreciation for second chances.
Preface
This book is not about abuse.
That may seem like a strange way to begin a story that includes years of sexual abuse, incest, and rape at the hands of more than fifteen different men. Those things happened. They shaped parts of my childhood and left marks that took years of therapy, reflection, and hard work to understand and overcome.
But this book is not a graphic retelling of those events.
I will reference them, because pretending they didn’t happen would make this story incomplete. However, I have no desire to relive them in detail, and I have no intention of giving those moments more power than they deserve. The abuse is part of my history, but it is not the center of my life, and it is not the focus of this book.
This book is about surviving.
It is about the strange and complicated ways a child learns to endure when the world around them feels unsafe. It is about the people who appeared along the way—some who helped, some who hurt, and some who changed the direction of my life in ways they may never have realized.
It is about the dogs that became my companions when people could not be trusted. It is about the moments of kindness that stood out like small lights in very dark places. And it is about the long road from a childhood defined by chaos to a life built with purpose, resilience, and hope.
Many people have told me for years that I should write a book about my life. For a long time I resisted the idea. Some memories are heavy, and some stories take time before they are ready to be told. What you will find in these pages are not detailed accounts of every painful year, but small fragments of moments that shaped my path. There are gaps—years that remain unspoken—not because they did not happen, but because my life today is defined not by the trauma, but by what came after it.
But eventually I realized something important: monsters only win when their victims remain silent.
So this book is not about the monsters.
It is about the person who survived them.
Chapter 1
The Laundry Room
I was seven years old when I learned that love was negotiable.
My mother had a habit of “giving me away” whenever it was convenient. Once, my sister and I were left on my father and stepmother’s porch as a wedding gift, waiting for them to come home from their reception. We weren’t luggage. But we weren’t far from it either.
That winter, my uncle decided I needed to be “tuned.”
He lived in a tiny trailer off Salt Creek Road with his girlfriend. I was pulled from school and brought there without ceremony. For two weeks, I was not a child. I was labor. I cleaned. I cooked. I stayed silent. Speaking without permission came with consequences.
One night he called me into the living room after his girlfriend had gone to bed.
The television hummed in black and white. I recognized it immediately — it was mine. I had earned it through church reward auctions, saving tickets like treasure. My mother had given it to him. I wasn’t allowed to look at it anymore.
He told me to sit beside him.
My heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it. My hands were wet. I remember staring at the edge of the couch before I moved, thinking that if I obeyed perfectly, maybe this would end quickly. Maybe I could go home.
I would be good, I promised myself. I would do whatever my mother wanted. I just wanted her to take me back.
He spoke. I don’t remember the words. I remember his eyebrows lifting as he talked. I remember his hand on my knee. The pressure. The squeezing. The way pain can make your ears ring.
When it was over, he told me to go to bed.
Bed.
My bed was a dog mat on the laundry room floor.
The room smelled wet and metallic, like old water and rust. It was always cold. The washing machine pressed against my back as I lay down, the metal biting into my skin. The light was off. The house was silent.
Except for the dogs.
Two Labrador retrievers shifted closer in the dark. I could hear their breathing before I felt them. Warm. Solid. Alive. They nudged their noses against my face and licked the tears I couldn’t stop.
I wrapped my arms around them and buried my face in their fur.
In that dark laundry room, on a thin mat that wasn’t meant for a child, those dogs were the only living things that chose me.
I sobbed into their coats until sleep finally took me.
The room was cold.
But they were warm.
Chapter 2
The Hole in the Ground
Chapter 3
After the Miracle
I don’t remember falling.
I remember being warned.
There was a gate. A man — I assume the property owner — told me not to go back there.
“You’ll fall in a hole,” he said.
I opened the gate anyway.
After that, my memory goes quiet.
Everything I know about what happened next was told to me by witnesses.
The well was thirty feet deep. I fell twelve feet before my small body became wedged in the narrow shaft. Whether it was gravity or the tightness of the circular wall that stopped me, no one knows. What they do know is that I disappeared.
My sister was with me. She later said the ground “sucked him up.” She ran inside screaming for my mother and a neighbor. When they followed her outside, she led them to a small, dark opening in the earth.
A tiny circle.
A child-sized grave.
They screamed when they realized I was down there.
They clawed at the dirt with their hands at first — frantic, instinctive, powerless. But fear of the walls collapsing forced them to stop.
They called 911.
Help came quickly.
The plan was desperate and dangerous: dig down beside the well with a backhoe as deep as possible, then tunnel sideways underneath me and try to pull me free before either shaft collapsed.
Every scoop of dirt held its breath.
Workers shouted down into the hole.
“Preston! Are you still with us?”
“Do you want ice cream?”
No response.
They feared I had run out of oxygen. They lowered a line down, hoping air might reach me. They kept yelling.
“Hang in there!”
“We’re coming!”
Time stretched. Machines roared. Dirt flew. Men shoveled with the kind of urgency that only exists when a child is buried alive.
When the equipment could dig no deeper, it became hand work. Shovels. Sweat. Raw panic disguised as focus.
Then came the tunnel.
I imagine the moment they broke through felt like striking gold. Matt Potter — the man who went into the tunnel — reached through and grabbed my legs. He pulled like his life depended on it.
Dirt fell.
Walls shifted.
He pulled again.
And then I was free.
They rushed me up the mound of dirt and into the waiting ambulance.
My next memory is not darkness.
It’s the fire station.
I was sitting on my mother’s lap, surrounded by the men who saved my life. They gave me a hat that read Mills Fire Department. The local paper took our picture. Flashbulbs. Smiles. A miracle story.
I remember sitting in her arms.
And I remember thinking:
Now she’ll love me.
Almost dying had to count for something.
Surely being nearly lost meant I was valuable.
Surely surviving meant I was precious.
That photograph is the only memory I have of sitting in my mother’s lap and feeling wanted.
It would not last.
Almost dying did not make me safer.
If anything, it made me quieter.
After the well, life did not change in the ways I had hoped. There was no new vigilance. No new protection. No tightening of boundaries around me.
Instead, access to me became easier.
My uncle did not disappear after the rescue. He remained part of the orbit. So did my mother’s friends. Adults who were supposed to represent safety began to represent something else entirely.
It didn’t happen all at once. It never does.
It happens in layers.
A comment that lingers too long.
A hand that doesn’t move away quickly enough.
Being called into a room after everyone else is asleep.
At seven, you don’t have language for violation.
You only know discomfort. Confusion. The sense that something is wrong but you are the one being told to behave.
It became routine.
That is the part people struggle to understand.
Abuse, when repeated, does not always feel explosive. It becomes procedural. Predictable. Scheduled into the rhythm of life like chores or dinner.
I learned quickly that resistance brought consequences. Silence brought survival.
I also learned something far more dangerous:
If adults want something from you, you give it.
If you want to be kept, you comply.
The well had taught me that almost disappearing made people rush toward me.
The abuse taught me that staying quiet kept me from disappearing again.
Those lessons intertwined.
And somewhere inside that small body, a belief began forming:
My value is tied to what I endure.
Chapter 4
The Dogs Under the House
We were poor.
Not “forgot to pack lunch money” poor.
More like “if poverty had a mascot, it would’ve been our trailer” poor.
We lived in a small single-wide my great-grandmother owned. The floors creaked. The wind found its way through seams it shouldn’t have. But for a little while, I had toys.
My favorite was a metal dump truck.
Oh god I loved that thing. Big, Yellow Solid Metal.
The wood stove sat on broken bricks, and I’d load those bricks into the bed of my dump truck one by one, haul them across the room, unload them, and start over. It was construction. It was purpose. It was control.
My mother would sit on the couch, applying her makeup in the glow of afternoon light. It was best not to disturb her. Disturbing her meant consequences — not from her hands, but from someone else’s.
She rarely hit me.
She preferred to outsource it.
If I misbehaved, she would wait for my father to return from a trucking run, or she would call Joe. Sometimes Joe wouldn’t show up until days later, but he always came.
Punishment was delayed but never canceled.
I remember once he yanked the power cord from the back of a ghetto blaster — the kind everyone had in the ’80s to most it’s a “tressure” that brings back good times and happy memories. For me, it brings back terror— the cord used as a whip for something I’d done days before. Other times it was fists or being sat on top of my tiny frame to a 200+ lb man. Or being grabbed by my ankles and lifted upside down dropped on my head over and over like it was a game all while I screamed for my mother.
“Stop yelling,” she’d shout from the couch.
Where was the mother from the fire station photograph?
The one who held me like I mattered? The one who presented me to the world like Simba from the Lion King.
She had been replaced by a woman who seemed inconvenienced by my existence. Joe became the arm of whatever anger she carried.
I learned to keep quiet, stay clear, throw my toys away before they angered her.
I learned the sound of his muffler before I learned multiplication tables.
When I heard it rumbling down the driveway, I ran.
And I ran to the dogs.
We had a lot of them. Crystal, our almost feral husky, bred again and again. The puppies grew into wary, under-socialized huskies who spent most of their time hiding beneath the trailer. They weren’t friendly to outsiders.
But they were gentle with me.
I would crawl under the house with them, pressing into their thick fur, listening to their breathing. It smelled like dirt and dog and safety.
Under that trailer, I wasn’t a problem to be corrected.
I was just another small creature trying to survive.
Eventually, the huskies became an issue in the neighborhood. They were roaming. Scaring people. Attacking livestock coming home with their feet entombed in bear traps neighbors had set annoyed by their existence, just as my mother was annoyed by mine. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew they were mine.
One day my father came home from a trucking trip.
By the end of it, the dogs were gone.
In the 1980s, “animal control” looked different. There wasn’t fines. There wasn’t animal control threats. All there was, was a shotgun. It was almost the way of the west.
I have never hated my father more than I did that day.
My mother made it worse. She told me she hadn’t wanted it done — that my dad “hated those dogs.” And if he hated them, maybe he hated me too.
For years, I believed her.
I didn’t understand until much later that the dogs had become nearly feral. That people had been hurt. That my father had few options in a rural town with limited resources.
But childhood doesn’t process nuance.
It processes loss.
What I remember most isn’t the sound.
It’s the smell.
My father reloaded his own shells. The metallic scent of gun parts. The plastic wads. The fine grit of gunpowder. I used to play with the packing machine, not understanding what it assembled.
Now I associate that smell with the day my protectors disappeared.
I hated guns.
I hated what they represented.
Because those dogs were the only ones who never asked me to earn their affection.
And they were taken too.
Chapter 5
The World Tilts
After years of abuse, molestation, incest, cruel treatment, and complete neglect from my mother, I had grown used to being passed around like something nobody really wanted. She handed me from person to person, each one using me for whatever purpose suited them. I learned early that I wasn’t something to be protected. I was something to be tolerated… or used.
Then I met the Tiemans.
Their daughter Mandy became my best friend. Mandy and I did the normal kid things together — the kinds of things I had only ever watched other children do. She had a playroom filled with toys. Shelves of games. Dolls and puzzles and things meant for kids who were actually allowed to be kids.
I didn’t have much experience with that.
Mandy and I would play for hours, and on weekends we would go to the roller rink and skate until we were exhausted. For those moments I could almost pretend I was just another normal kid.
But it wasn’t the toys that made their house different.
It was her mother.
Jane Tieman.
While the other kids in the neighborhood ran around outside yelling and playing, Jane and I would sometimes sit at the kitchen table and talk. We would sit there for hours. Looking back now, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. It probably wasn’t anything important.
But I remember how it felt.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel afraid.
I didn’t feel like I had to constantly watch the room, listen for footsteps, or brace myself for someone’s temper to explode. I didn’t feel like something terrible was about to happen if I said the wrong thing.
I just sat there and talked.
And she listened.
That might not sound like much, but to a kid like me it meant everything.
I couldn’t understand why their house felt so different. I didn’t have the language for it yet. I didn’t know how to explain the absence of fear.
But I felt loved there.
There was one time Mandy and I were part of a play. I was so proud of it. I remember desperately wanting my mom to come see it. I wanted her to watch me perform. I wanted her to see me do something good.
Show after show she never came.
But the Tiemans were always there.
Every performance.
They clapped. They cheered. They smiled like I was their own kid standing up there on that stage. After the show they would tell me how well I did.
I remember climbing into the back seat of their car afterward. The interior was red leather. Even now I can still remember the smell of it.
That smell meant safety.
It meant someone cared whether I succeeded or failed.
It meant someone showed up.
By this point I was spending so much time at their house that it barely felt like visiting anymore. Most weekends I was there. Sometimes longer. Slowly, without me even realizing it, their home started to feel like the closest thing I had to a real one.
Jane knew something about my life wasn’t right.
I never told her the full truth about the abuse I had endured. I didn’t know how to say those things out loud. But she could see enough to know that my upbringing with my mother wasn’t normal.
Eventually she and her husband began talking about something bigger.
They began talking about adopting me.
When they approached my biological mother with the idea, it wasn’t the dramatic confrontation someone might imagine. By that point I was practically a stray kid wandering between houses anyway.
Nothing about her life would really change.
She jumped at the opportunity.
Rehoming me meant about as much to her as giving away a stray kitten she had taken in and grown tired of.
The truth is she had never really connected with me in the first place.
But for me, the idea meant something completely different.
It meant freedom.
Freedom from Joe.
Freedom from my mother’s friends.
Freedom from the endless cruelty I had spent so many years enduring.
For the first time in my life there was a door out of that world.
But there was one more obstacle.
My father.
And based on everything my mother had told me growing up, I believed my father didn’t want me any more than she did.
So I assumed the adoption would simply happen.
I was wrong.
My dad had been living in Montana with his new wife and their newly born son. My mother had spent years filling my head with stories about him.
He hated me.
I was a burden.
He only cared about his new family.
The truth was much more complicated than that.
For years my parents had gone back and forth trying to establish some kind of custody arrangement. Sometimes we would go live with my father for a while. But sooner or later my mother would suddenly decide she wanted us back.
She would say she missed us.
She would say she loved us.
She would say she needed her babies.
But that wasn’t the real reason.
When we weren’t living with her, the welfare checks stopped.
The assistance she had learned to rely on disappeared. The sympathy she collected from acquaintances, family members, and government agencies dried up.
We were her income.
So whenever we returned to her house, our heads were filled with lies.
Your dad hates you.
You’re a burden to him.
He only wants his new family.
You can imagine what that does to a child.
I didn’t know my father well. He had left when I was young, and the chaos that followed made any normal relationship nearly impossible. Dealing with my mother was exhausting for anyone, and sometimes the easiest path for him was simply letting her take us back.
But when the Tiemans called him and explained the situation — that I had been living with them, that my mother was willing to sign over custody, and that they wanted to adopt me and give me a future — something changed.
My father absolutely refused.
He forbade the adoption.
Then he got in his car in Montana and drove all the way down to come get his son.
I remember the drive back to Montana. We drove through the night, mile after mile of dark highway that seemed to stretch on forever.
But I was excited.
For the first time in my life I believed I might finally be free.
Free from the people who had hurt me.
Free from the house where so many terrible things had happened.
They couldn’t follow me that far.
I believed everything was going to be okay.
But there was something the Tiemans never knew.
There was something boiling inside me that years of abuse had created.
A demon made of anger, fear, and pain that had been building for years.
Even when someone finally showed me love, my mind didn’t know how to accept it.
My heart didn’t believe I deserved it.
And that voice inside me kept whispering the same thing over and over.
You don’t belong here.
Settling into life in Montana wasn’t easy.
My father had remarried. I had a stepmother now, and brothers I barely knew. I wanted so badly for my stepmother to love me.
But the lies my mother had planted in my head kept growing.
My dad didn’t want me.
She didn’t want me.
They only wanted their real son.
Even my stepbrother — my stepmother’s son from a previous marriage — didn’t seem fully wanted either.
I tried to adapt.
But inside I was furious.
I felt abandoned by the Tiemans. I couldn’t see them anymore. I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t sit at that kitchen table that had once felt like the safest place in the world.
The one place I had ever felt truly protected was suddenly gone.
My father worked constantly. My stepmother worked too. Most days it was just me and my brothers — boys I barely knew and didn’t get along with.
School wasn’t any better.
Kids bullied me relentlessly. They beat me up. They mocked me. Every day felt like another reminder that I didn’t belong anywhere.
The anger inside me kept growing.
But anger wasn’t the only thing.
Fear grew too.
Even though I was hundreds of miles away, I was convinced my abusers were coming for me. Without the Tiemans there to protect me, who would stop them?
I started wetting the bed again.
I slept with knives hidden under my mattress.
I began stealing anything I could get my hands on. Food. Objects. Toys. In my mind I was stockpiling things because at any moment everything could be taken away again.
The anger finally began to spill out.
I smashed things.
I smashed toys — toys I had never had before but suddenly found myself surrounded by. I broke my brothers’ things. I broke my parents’ belongings.
I was furious at the world.
I hated my life.
I hated everything.
The one thing that had always brought me comfort — dogs — wasn’t there either.
My parents were afraid of the anger inside me. They feared that if we had animals I might hurt them.
But more than that…
They feared I might hurt them.
Or worse.
My brothers.
And in their eyes, the boy they had brought into their home was beginning to look less like a wounded child…
And more like a monster they didn’t know how to control
Chapter 6:
Locked Doors
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I had just been committed to my first mental institution — Rivendell Psychiatric Center.
Somehow I managed to get my first phone call. Except it wasn’t a call I made. It was an incoming call.
From my grandparents.
As a kid I don’t have many memories of them. Just fragments. Small snapshots in time. But the ones I do remember are warm.
I remember the candy dish.
I remember the sing-alongs.
I remember them sitting at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes while bacon fried on the stove.
The smell of that bacon still lives somewhere in my brain.
They were loving people. They cared about me deeply. At that time I was their first—and only—grandson on my father’s side.
So when staff told me I had a phone call and walked me down to the office, I went with them.
You have to understand something about institutions.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Girl, Interrupted, that’s the closest comparison most people might understand. Friendships form, traumatic things happen, and everyone inside is trying to survive their own chaos.
But what people don’t understand is the loss of freedom.
And I don’t mean the kind of freedom kids complain about when their parents tell them when to go to bed.
I mean everything.
You can’t use the bathroom when you want.
You can’t go outside when you want.
You can’t talk to who you want.
Every movement. Every action. Every breath almost feels like it requires permission.
For a ten-year-old boy who was already scared, angry, and confused, it felt like prison.
Most of the staff were just there to do a job.
They didn’t care about the job.
And they certainly didn’t care about a frightened little boy who had just been thrown into their system.
But my grandparents cared.
When I picked up that payphone in the office and heard my grandmother’s voice, something inside me broke.
I started crying.
Not the quiet kind of crying. I was sobbing. Begging them to get me out of there. Telling them how scared I was. Telling them I didn’t understand why I was there.
I just wanted to go home.
That was always the thought that ran through my mind growing up.
I wanted to go home when my uncle kidnapped me.
I wanted to go home when I was with an abuser.
I wanted to go home when I was with my dad.
I always wanted to go home.
But the truth was, I had no idea where home actually was.
Instead, I was trapped inside this massive brick building filled with people who had anger problems, drug addictions, and severe mental health issues.
There was even a murderer in there.
And I was ten years old.
I don’t remember everything my grandparents said during that call. I don’t even remember if they were both on the phone or if it was some kind of party line.
But I remember one sentence.
Clear as day.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get you out of there.”
Those words filled me with excitement.
Hope.
Relief.
I held onto them like a life raft.
I believed the nightmare was about to end.
But I was wrong.
The nightmare wasn’t ending.
In fact, it was just beginning.
That was the last time I ever spoke to my grandmother.
I didn’t learn the truth until years later.
At the time, like everything else in my life, I assumed they had abandoned me too.
I had already convinced myself I was just a piece of trash nobody wanted.
But the truth was very different.
My grandmother died in 1998 while I was still institutionalized.
I entered the system on February 14th, 1990.
I didn’t leave my final institution until the summer of 1997.
Seven years.
Seven years without birthdays.
Seven years without Christmas.
Seven years without Halloween or Thanksgiving.
Seven years without a normal childhood.
My father rarely visited.
We barely spoke.
Occasionally a family friend would stop in, but mostly it was just silence.
The Tiemans — the only other adults who had ever shown me real kindness — disappeared from my life too.
I had no way to contact them. I didn’t know their phone number. I didn’t know if they even knew where I was.
What I didn’t know then was that they had been looking for me.
Thinking about me.
Wondering if I was okay.
But from inside those locked walls, it felt like everyone had vanished.
And in my mind, if my grandparents had abandoned me, why would anyone else care?
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if I even belonged in those institutions.
Maybe I did.
Maybe I didn’t.
But the truth is simpler than all the diagnoses they tried to give me.
I was a little boy who had been sexually abused most of his life.
A boy who had been physically abused.
A boy who had been tortured by family members who used him as a release for their own anger.
Maybe what I needed was therapy.
Instead, I got locked doors, buzzers, and keys.
To this day, I hate keys.
I hate locked doors.
The sound of a door locking behind me still makes something inside my chest tighten.
Because in those places, everything was locked.
The bathrooms.
The bedrooms.
The hallways.
There were no toys.
No playgrounds.
No real childhood.
Just lectures, punishments, and something they called RBs — Recognized Behaviors.
If you behaved well enough, you earned a small reward.
Usually a tiny cup of root beer.
That was the system.
Do something good, get root beer.
Do something wrong, get an LB — a Learning Behavior — where they wrote down everything you did wrong and told you about it until you felt like garbage.
And that went on for years.
There were moments of light though.
One staff member named Mary used to call me Elvis.
I never figured out why.
Other patients would ask her why she called me that, and she’d just smile and say,
“Because he’s the king.”
Maybe she saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.
Maybe she just felt sorry for a scared little boy surrounded by teenagers and adults who were far more broken than he was.
One of the groups they placed me in was called Survivors Group.
I was the youngest kid there.
But I also had the most history of abuse.
Everyone in that room shared their trauma.
Their stories.
Their pain.
It was hard for me to speak, but eventually I told them everything.
I cried while I talked.
But when it was over, I remember feeling strangely lighter.
Like something inside me had finally been released.
After that group I made a phone call to my stepmother.
It was the first time I had ever told a family member what had been happening to me all those years.
I don’t remember exactly how that conversation went.
But I do remember that eventually I spoke with a detective.
Nothing ever came from it.
Most of the men who abused me were just passing through my mother’s life. Boyfriends. Friends. Strangers.
There were never charges.
Never arrests.
And honestly, by that point, I didn’t expect anyone to save me.
They taught us in school that police officers and firefighters were heroes.
But nobody had ever come to save me.
So I learned to save myself.
I learned to hide.
I learned not to speak.
Because speaking only brought more consequences.
And slowly, all that anger and pain started turning inward.
I began to feel ugly.
Unwanted.
Unworthy.
Feelings I still struggle with today.
I moved from institution to institution not really know where I was going to be
tomorrow
Chapter 6
The Swecker House
By the time I arrived at the Swecker group home, I was already what the system called a ward of the state.
That phrase sounds official, almost protective, like someone important is looking after you. But in reality it just meant nobody really knew what to do with me anymore. I’d been placed in about five different mental institutions by this point and now they were just going to dump me where they could.
The Sweckers ran what was technically called a group home, though it was more like a holding place for foster kids the system needed to put somewhere. It was supposed to be transitional housing. A stop along the way.
But to me it felt like another house of horrors.
The Sweckers had a beautiful tri-level home. From the outside it looked perfect—like something from a magazine. Trim lawn, nice neighborhood, the kind of place people drove by and assumed a happy family lived there.
But the foster kids didn’t live in that house.
We lived downstairs.
A baby gate stood at the top of the stairs like a border we weren’t allowed to cross. Unless we were coming upstairs for breakfast or dinner, we were not allowed past it. The rest of the time we stayed below.
The downstairs had three or four bedrooms filled with cheap wood framed bunk beds. The mattresses were thin and uncomfortable. Everything down there felt temporary, like furniture meant for a summer camp that never ended.
We rarely saw Dwayne or Diane Swecker. They didn’t talk to us much, didn’t interact with us unless we had done something wrong. Sometimes we were allowed upstairs to clean or dust the house, but even that was rare.
Mostly, we stayed behind the gate.
I often think about the movie The People Under the Stairs when I remember that place. In that movie, the couple keeps children hidden away in their house and terrible things happen to them.
The Sweckers didn’t feed kids to each other like the movie.
But sometimes it felt close enough.
There were six other kids living there with me. None of them liked me. Kids in places like that learn quickly that survival often means finding someone weaker than you.
And I always seem to be the weakest.
Except for Dusty.
Dusty Dusipin was the only one who treated me like a human being. Dusty was also my first boy crush, but I hadn’t yet come to terms with these feelings yet. Those feelings only brought up the dark feeling of disgust with myself.
Fights broke out often between the kids. Sometimes it was screaming, sometimes fists. No one came to stop it. No one came to check on us.
The Sweckers didn’t seem to care.
By then I had been diagnosed with ADHD, though I barely understood what that meant. All I knew was that school was nearly impossible.
Teachers talked and the words slipped past me like water through my hands. I couldn’t concentrate. I fell further and further behind. Other kids noticed.
And kids can smell weakness like sharks smell blood.
They teased me. Mocked me. Made fun of me constantly.
Life in the Swecker house had its own strange rules. Dwayne ran mornings like a drill sergeant. He’d come downstairs and shout for everyone to wake up.
You got one wake-up call.
If you fell back asleep, that was it. You were on your own.
If you missed breakfast, you went to school hungry. There was no granola bar, no quick snack, no second chance.
That happened to me more times than I can count.
I would sit in class with my stomach growling so loudly I was sure everyone could hear it, counting the minutes until lunch.
Eventually, something unexpected happened.
I made a friend.
His name was Jerry.
I had actually known Jerry years before when I lived with my dad and stepmom. Back then he wasn’t my friend at all.
He was a bully.
He used to beat me up at the bus stop.
But kids grow up. Things change.
Now we were preteens, and somehow Jerry and I became friends.
Not really at school. At school we kept our distance. No one really wanted to be friends with the weak Preston.
But outside of school, we were friends.
Jerry lived only a few houses away, and amazingly the Sweckers allowed me to go over there sometimes.
Jerry’s family had a tradition.
Taco Tuesday.
I loved Taco Tuesday.
But more than the tacos, I loved Jerry’s mom.
I think her name was Linda, though I can’t remember for certain. What I do remember is how kind she was.
She reminded me of my biological mother.
Not the cruel version of my mother—the one who passed me from man to man and ignored the horrors happening to me.
She reminded me of the rare good moments.
The few times my mom rubbed my back when I was sick. The nights she laid beside me when I had a fever.
Those memories were rare, but they existed.
Jerry’s mom felt like that.
She would offer me snacks, ask about my day, talk to me like I mattered.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Safe.
I started spending more and more time there.
Too much time.
Jerry’s family eventually began to notice things. They started hearing about the way the Sweckers treated us.
They didn’t like it.
One Taco Tuesday, something happened. I don’t even remember exactly what. I just remember sitting there crying and telling Jerry’s mom about it.
That night she made a decision.
She told me I wasn’t going back there.
Part of me felt relieved.
Another part of me was terrified.
What would Dwayne do?
What would Diane do?
They had never hit me, but their punishments could be just as cruel. Sometimes they even encouraged the other kids to take things out on me.
We sat around eating tacos while my mind raced.
At any moment Dwayne could show up.
And he did.
A loud knock slammed against the door.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
Jerry’s mom refused to open it.
Dwayne shouted through the door asking where I was.
“He’s eating tacos,” she replied.
Dwayne said I needed to come home.
That night, the rebellion ended quickly.
I left with him.
When we got back, I was told I was never allowed to go to Jerry’s house again. I was to go to school and come straight home.
But that rule didn’t last long.
I started sneaking out.
Soon enough I was back at Taco Tuesday again.
And once again, Dwayne showed up.
This time Jerry’s mom refused to let me go.
Dwayne threatened to call the police.
Jerry’s mom told him to go ahead.
If the police came, maybe they would finally see what was happening in that house.
For the first time in my life, someone was standing up for me.
The police arrived.
They took me down to the station.
I sat in what people usually call the drunk tank—a locked room with a camera watching.
But strangely, I felt calm there.
Places with locked doors were familiar to me by then.
Safer than most homes.
I remember listening to voices outside the room.
One voice stood out.
Diane Swecker.
She told the officers I was a troubled child. That they had tried nothing but love and affection. That they were trying to help me.
It was all lies.
She had never shown me love.
Not once.
Eventually the officer opened the door.
Diane came in, wrapped her arm around me, and hugged me.
It was the first time she had ever done that.
I almost laughed.
The performance was so obvious it felt ridiculous.
But I knew what was coming.
The moment we got into the car, the mask dropped.
She screamed at me the whole way home.
I had embarrassed her. I was stupid. I would never see Jerry or his family again.
Her plan was simple.
Dwayne would take me to school.
Dwayne would pick me up.
And I would stay locked in my room.
In a moment of sudden bravery—or maybe desperation—I grabbed the steering wheel and pushed with all the strength my small arms could muster. Diane screamed, slamming on the brakes as the car jerked to a stop. She whipped around, her face inches from mine, shouting and cursing, calling me a terrible child, telling me she was not going to tolerate another second of my behavior. Whatever brief triumph I had felt vanished instantly. All that remained in my bones was fear.
We returned home, sent straight to basement. I cried, Dustin came and asked me what happened and if I was ok. I knew I’d never see the light of day again.
But somehow I got out again.
I made it back to Jerry’s house one more time.
When Jerry’s mom came home and heard what had happened, she made another decision.
This time she called the police herself.
She told them something was wrong in that house and she wasn’t letting me go back.
She said she was willing to risk going to jail for kidnapping if that’s what it took.
For a boy who had never had a voice, it was overwhelming.
She never said the words I love you.
But I felt loved. Immensely loved.
In my young mind, she was a superhero. A small woman with a fierce presence, standing up and fighting for me with a strength that felt larger than life.
The police came and they took me again.
I spent a short time at the station before they transferred me to another institution called YSC.
It was still locked doors and cameras.
But it wasn’t maximum security like some of the other places I’d been.
People mostly kept to themselves.
I had already given up on expecting anything good.
Then one day I got a visitor.
Jerry’s family had come to see me.
They brought small treats and trinkets and told me they hoped I would be okay.
That day I something I had never done. I told them the truth about everything.
The abuse.
The institutions.
All of it.
Jerry’s mom hugged me and told me I was still a good person.
Then they left.
I never saw them again.
Not long after that, the state decided to try something different.
A foster home.
Not a group home like the Swecker house.
A real foster family.