Orphan's return stirs mixed emotions

When Rachelle Grey returns to Carson City, she feels a sense of home. There's nostalgia in the trails along C Hill where she trained for cross-country while at Carson Middle School, and she finds comfort in the familiarity of the streets.

But it's also a place that haunts the 25-year-old.

Buildings throughout the city house painful memories that shaped her life. Memories of her mother using and selling drugs. Memories of her father's abuse. The memory of the day she tried to end it all.

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Rachelle was 8 when she first came to Carson City. Her mother had just left Rachelle's abusive father and fled to Carson City with her new boyfrined - a bodyguard for their escort service in Las Vegas.

It wasn't long, though, before her mother was arrested for drug trafficking, and Rachelle and her brother and sister went back to their father, who later moved to Carson City, as well.

The years following were full of unhappiness for Rachelle. She saw little of her mother. And without her mother there, Rachelle said, her father turned his abuse on her. In addition to the beatings, she said, he also employed emotional abuse, pitting her siblings against her.

Miserable at home, she turned her focus to school, earning straight A's.

"It was something that was always in my control," she said. "I couldn't control much else."

Along the way, she said, she confided in teachers and counselors about her abuse, showing them the bruises that marked her body.

Child Protective Services got involved, she said, but only to offer treatment to her father.

"I was really desperate," she said. "No one listened to me. No one believed me."

Her desperation hit a breaking point at 15. Her mother finally quit drugs and was ready to take the kids back, but then she was diagnosed with cancer. She died within the year.

Heartbroken and hopeless, Rachelle saw only one way out. Trapped in her despair, she swallowed bleach.

And, in a way, it was her way out.

After treatment, she was released from the hospital into the care of the state. A short time later, her father relinquished parental rights.

Officially an orphan, Rachelle was placed with different foster families, ending up in a group home wtih her siblings in Virginia City.

With a more stable life at home, she thrived at Virginia City High School. She earned a spot on the cheerleading squad, was elected student body president and graduated as salutatorian of her 2004 class.

After a year at the University of Nevada, Reno, she transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 2009 with a degree in international affairs after studying abroad in Egypt.

She now works for a public affairs firm in D.C.

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Although Rachelle is working toward a happy ending for her story, she said, it is a constant struggle not having parents.

Graduating at the height of the economic meltdown, jobs were hard to come by.

"I knew so many people who moved in with their parents after college," she said. "That's not an option for people like me."

So she rented a closet-sized apartment in a seedy neighborhood and took a job at a sporting-goods store. She usually had only enough money to eat one package of ramen noodles a day.

"It was depressing, but I knew what I had to do," she said.

It was a familiar feeling. In her first year of college, she was nearly hospitalized with a kidney infection, but had no idea how to get health insurance.

Tax returns, rental agreements, student loans, even how to open an umbrella - she learned through trial and error.

But looking back, she said, she wouldn't change any of it. She wouldn't erase the agony of the bleach, even though tears still stream down her cheeks from the pain that hasn't healed.

"I definitely wouldn't condone it," she said. "But I would do it again."

She calls foster care her salvation. It got her away from an abusive father and opened doors to scholarships and other aid.

More than the system itself, she's grateful to the people who have shown her kindness along the way.

"Just hearing from someone that you're not a waste of space, you're worth something," she said. "For someone who's been beaten down, it means a lot. Those can be the moments you look to when you're feeling the most down."

And she tries to share the message with other kids who may be living in poverty or with abuse.

"You don't have to be what you're going through right now," she said. "You decide who you are."