Summary

                                                

 "Medicine" April's parents referred to alcohol as "medicine". They told April and Cheryl that they were sick and that they took this medicine to make them "feel better".

April and Cheryl Raintree, they were in foster care from just being a little girl to 18 years old.  The girls got separated from each other and placed in different foster homes. Cheryl went to live with the MacAdams family and April went to live with the Dions. Both families welcomed the girls in their homes very nicely and treated them as if they were their own kids. Mrs Dion got very sick and they had to say their good-byes to April. In no way did they want too… April got placed with a new foster family by the name of the DeRosiers. The mother and her children, Maggie and Ricky where very mean to April. They made her do all the house work and they called her the "half breed". Because April was called a “Half breed” for so long she started looking down on her culture and wished she was white like the DeRosiers. Finally April understands her parents weren’t actually sick and they just enjoyed getting drunk… She never told Cheryl this; she kept it to herself. Cheryl comes to live with April at the DeRosiers. She stands up to the DeRosiers more than April ever did and April starts to stand up for herself more as well. April and Cheryl were very smart kids when it came to schooling. Meggie and Ricky on the other hand were not all that smart when it came to schooling, that’s the one thing April and Cheryl knew and were VERY proud of. The school had no idea what was going on in the foster home Cheryl and April where placed in. April and Cheryl both had to wear really ugly and old school clothing. April had one friend named  Sarah who would bring April nice clothes to wear; she just kept them in her locker and changed at school and changed before they went home on the bus. Meggie and Ricky told the hole school some very rude and untrue thing about Cheryl and April.  Bus rides to school they were bugged and taunted. April had to write an essay about something that meant a lot to her. She wrote about her family issues with the DeRosiers. The school was very shocked and told April something would be done about it very soon. One day April and Cheryl’s social worker came to the house Cheryl got moved to a new home she got moved to the Seinballs. Shortly after that Aprils social worker came to see the new house, he was a new social worker. He had asked to see Aprils bedroom and Mrs.DeRosiers showed him Meggie’s room. April got enough nerve to say “ actually my room is downstairs. April showed him her ran down bedroom with an ugly dresser and a very very ugly bed. That day April got moved with Cheryl. She lived with Cheryl and the Steinballs until she was old enough to be on her own. April moved to Toronto got married and lived with her husband Bob. She looked for her mother and father a little but gave up when it seemed impossible to find them.  Cheryl was finally on her own at this point too. They both went down the same path trying to find their parents but she never did either. Cheryl became involved with alcohol and lived for that. Cheryl went to secondary school for being a social worker but gave that dream up to be an alcoholic. April at this point had a very successful life, she worked in a law firm and she was a lawyers asst. One day April got a call and was told Cheryl was in the hospital. Cheryl got beat by her former boyfriend. April went Cheryl and her boyfriends house to get some of Cheryl’s things; but April never got that far. She was brutal raped and beaten by 4 full grown men. They had found all 4 men who had done that to April through out the book, One was killed and the other 3 where put in jail. Cheryl and April moved in together after that, they lived with each other for pretty much the rest of the book. They had found their father and found out their mother had killed herself by jumping off of a bridge. Cheryl took off after that and April didn’t see her until she got a call from Nancy the friend Cheryl had been living with telling her that she felt Cheryl was going to do something really bad. April got the police and the police had told her that someone was trying to kill herself off of the same bridge her mother did, Cheryl had shown up 5 minutes to late. Her sister had killed herself the same way their mother did.  April goes through Cheryl's journals and discovers in more depth what Cheryl had been going through. She found out  that Cheryl actually had a son, Henri Liberty, and that he was living with Nancy right now. For the first time, April didn't look down on her native culture. It took Cheryl’s death for April to find her identity.