LOTF: Before and After

Laurie Langley

One of the hottest debates of human history in the social sciences is whether or not people are the products of nature or nurture. Experts talk of serial killers and rapists, raising the question of whether or not they became monsters as a result of negligent parenting or turned homicidal due to an inevitable makeup of genes and DNA that sealed their fate before birth.

What Laurie Prescott had determined by the time she turned twelve years old was that we couldn't possibly be the products of nurture alone. Her own family was concrete evidence of that. Laurie, the youngest of three full-blooded siblings, knew that her parents did their very best with all three of her, her brother, and her sister. They were raised the same way, on the same values, using the same parenting tactics, asked to follow the same rules, under the same roof.

And yet, the three of them couldn't have possibly been more different.

The oldest Prescott sibling was her big brother, Jackson, also commonly referred to as Jack in his prepubescent and teen years. He was a full five and a half years older than Laurie, but the two of them couldn't have been closer in their early life. Jackson looked out for both his little sisters throughout their grade school years. Laurie was coddled the most by both Jackson and their parents; a default role she played as a result of being born the youngest daughter.

Jackson was the sibling Laurie was closest to. Her older sister, Alison, was only two years older than her. The two girls squabbled and fought on a regular basis. They fought over clothes, food, toys, play space, sharing a bedroom, hogging hot water in the bathroom, makeup, and who got to chose the tape to play on the ride to school each morning. Laurie was usually handed the benefit of the doubt in her fights with Alison; another advantage to being the youngest. By the time they entered their teen years, Alison practically hated Laurie. She blamed her little sister for everything that went missing in her bedroom, for every chore she was asked to do that Laurie never had to, for every time she got in trouble for something that, in her mind, was really Laurie's fault.

In spite of the complex but still typical family dynamics among the Prescott family, they had an otherwise pretty good childhood. Their parents were never rich, but they didn't struggle for money either. They had a nice house, and even though the two girls had to share a room for most of their early years, it was big enough that they didn't feel like they were on top of each other all the time. That was, until they started fighting constantly.

When Alison turned fifteen and Laurie thirteen, Jackson graduated from high school. Soon after, he moved into the unfinished basement and fixed the spare bedroom up down there himself with a little help from his father. Thankfully, just as the girls' bickering was about to hit an all time high, they were able to separate into their own bedrooms.

Laurie was forced to take Jack's smaller room because she was younger and Alison was pushy. So Alison got the bigger bedroom to herself, though Laurie didn't care much about that. She was simply relieved to have some space from her big sister who was turning more and more into a cruel mean girl with each passing day.

Laurie's mother, Diana Prescott, was a professional baker and chef at a local restaurant. Her father, Benjamin Prescott, was the manager at a bank. Her father made two thirds of the family income, but he always told Diana and the kids that there was no 'his money' and 'mommy's money.' There was only all of their money, family money. What was his was theirs, and vise versa.

Benjamin had no idea that this state of mind would soon come back to bite him in the butt. It had done nothing but good for their family until the day he noticed that money was going missing from his wallet. He let it go the first time, and even the second time he noticed it. But eventually, he realized the stealing wasn't going to stop. It was never much, only one or two bills at a time and never any bigger than a $50. Though, that wasn't the point. He knew he couldn't accuse anyone of it directly, having no idea who it was that was stealing from him or why. So he called a family meeting one night in hopes that he taught his kids well enough to own up to it. But none of the kids cracked; each one of them looked just as confused as the others.