Twelve: A Memoir of Survival, Broken Silence, and Hope

A true story of kidnapping, survival, and the twelve-year-old girl who refused to disappear. "I was a statistic, a case file, a 'particularly vulnerable young girl who would suffer lifelong mental harm,' but God had a plan." She was twelve. He’d been planning it for months, maybe even years. In 1985, a man Michelle’s family trusted dictated a runaway note and made her copy it in her own handwriting. He took her and locked her in a wooden box beneath his waterbed. For fifty days, Michelle survived in darkness with a flashlight, a jug of water, and an orange that smelled like the California groves she ran through every fall. At one point, her own brother sat in the room directly above her, inches away, with no idea she was there. She pressed her palm flat against the wood and cried without making a sound. When police found her, she was four and a half months pregnant. She was still twelve. What followed was a journey through a system that had no idea what to do with her — a home for unwed mothers, courtroom testimony at eight months pregnant, foster care, and the daily reality of learning to be a mother before she’d learned to be a teenager.