Abby Lucille Burke

[ABBY LUCILLE BURKE]

Hey, my name is ABBY LUCILLE BURKE but everyone calls me ABBY OR ABS. Some people say I look like, CASSADEE POPE, but I'm not sure I see it. I'm a GIRL, duh, and I love BOYS. I know I'm only 20, but I've seen a lot since 11/24/1991. I am a BAND member of DANGEROUS SURRENDER.



I've got a voice in my head that goes by BOBBIE, and they're 25. I've had them for FOUR YEARS OR SO. They also bother NO ONE, or so I'm told.



I love COFFEE, GLITTER, MOUNTAIN DEW, EYELINER, TATTOOS, WRITING SONGS, DANCING, BRIGHT COLORS, CONVERSE, LOUD MUSIC, WRIST WARMERS, and totally hate SPINACH, MICE, SPIDERS, SNAKES, CRIME SHOWS, MY PARENTS. Most people say I'm FEISTY, FLIRTATIOUS, STUBBORN, LOUD, OUTGOING, but I think I'm just the DAUGHTER of SHELDON AND AMY WHO BOTH ABANDONED ME, BUT HE WAS A MECHANIC AND SHE WAS A PROFESSIONAL COLLEGE STUDENT. I am an ONLY CHILD. They think I'm crazy since I've got CHUNKY BLONDE HIGHLIGHTS AND A HUGE TATTOO OF A SINGING BIRD ON MY FOREARM, and sometimes pretend not to know me.



My past is pretty complicated, but if you're sure you want to hear it...

If they were honest, Sheldon Burke and Amy Powell never wanted children. Not
together, anyway. Really, though, they ought to have expected that their careless ways
would catch up to them at some point. They were high school sweethearts of the worst sort. Amy, having been born and raised in Long Island, was prim, proper, pretty, and the captain of the cheerleading squad. Sheldon was everything parents don't want to see their charming daughter bring home. He was eighteen when she was sixteen, and had graduated high school. He worked as a mechanic and never hoped to become any better.

But he was the bad boy, and Amy couldn't resist the attraction. When she found out she was pregnant, Amy was sure it was a sign that Sheldon was the man she was meant to marry. Sheldon just saw it as a sign that he should be more careful who he laid down with. He pretended to be happy, though, because he could see that it was what Amy wanted. When it became clear, though, that she actually expected a wedding, Sheldon wasted no time packing up and heading out, leaving a very pregnant Amy alone with her parents. In a last ditch effort to win Sheldon over, she gave her daughter the man's last name. It never did change anything between them, though.

Amy was entirely too young to be a decent parent. Her parents realized that fact and agreed to help her care for the child. Truthfully, they did a great deal more parenting than their daughter ever did. When Amy was twenty-two and Abby was five, Amy went out for a night on the town. She never did return. Abby's grandparents pretended everything was fine, but Abby knew something was wrong. She wasn't stupid; she did realize that they weren't her parents. After all, she'd never called them Mom and Dad. Mommy was a title that had always been reserved for Amy, and Abby had learned that mommies were always supposed to come home. It took nearly a month of pestering before her grandparents told Abby that her mommy wasn't coming home. She was alright. She'd just decided that she wasn't cut out to be a parent. Initially, Abby took the news well. Her mommy hadn't been the one that took care of her most of the time anyway. It wasn't until she got older that she began to resent the woman.

In an effort to ensure that Abby was raised in the proper manner, her grandparents decided to enroll her in a host of activities that would make her marketable to the best private schools. When she was seven, she began piano lessons and ballet. At nine, she began horseback riding. By the time she was in eighth grade, though, she'd dropped everything except for piano lessons. It wasn't that she loved the rigidity of classical piano. It was that the music itself held a special appeal for her. She couldn't quite convince herself to get away from it.

Her musical prowess did earn Abby a fair amount of recognition, and she attended a private arts academy for high school. Around this same time, though, Abby started to really feel the effects of having been abandoned by both of her parents. Her friends all had parents. In fact, many of her friends had two sets of parents because of divorce. She, however, only had a set of grandparents, and their health was quickly declining. Having been taught to behave well and exposed to the better parts of society, Abby understood that she was expected to keep herself within the good graces of the upper class families in the area. She needed to keep her scholarships to stay at this school. She was also beginning to understand, though, that this private school and these high class "friends" weren't what she wanted.

She'd begun to extricate herself from the group by the time she was fifteen. She discouraged their social advances, generally claiming she had to practice for a recital or something similar. She also told her grandparents that she had too much school work to continue with piano lessons. With a network of false excuses, the girl managed to quit her classical piano lessons, wiggle away from most of her petty schoolmates, and leave herself quite a bit of free time for exploring all the things she'd never done. She began to sneak out at night. She started smoking, though she always swore the smell on her hair and clothes was from being too close to someone else who smoked. She bought a fake ID for much more money than it was probably worth and used it to sneak into clubs and bars. Quitting piano lessons made her miss music, though, and she picked up an acoustic guitar from a pawn shop, which she taught herself to play after her grandparents had gone to bed.

The day after her seventeenth birthday, Abby's grandfather passed away. He was old, and she'd been expecting it to happen, but it was still tough. The situation became even harder when her grandmother died six weeks later, leaving Abby entirely alone. She was only seventeen and, thereby, still a minor. But she was too old to expect to be adopted at this point. She'd heard the horrors of foster families, and knew she wanted to avoid that at all costs, as well. So, Abby pulled together her best impression of a mature, well-bred young woman and applied for emancipation. Her bad habits had never been recognized by any legal body, and the court decided that she seemed responsible enough to care for herself, so they granted her emancipation.

Taking care of herself was a lot harder than Abby had imagined. She couldn't afford the upkeep of her grandparents' house even though they'd willed it to her, and she had to find somewhere else to live. She'd been spoiled to living in the nicer areas of town, but with the part time job she'd gotten waiting tables at a local restaurant, she only made enough money to rent a tiny studio apartment on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building in New York City. It was the best she could do, though. If she wanted to have any money left over for her expensive bad habits, anyway.

In a stroke of good luck, which Abby likes to say comes naturally to her (though her family situation doesn't really prove that true), Abby happened to show up at a bar the same night Topher Sands was playing in the house band. He was cute, so she didn't mind spending time with him, and realizing that he had a fair amount of musical talent made it easy for Abby to come up with the idea that they should start a band. She had very few other career prospects, and she was certain that he didn't want to play in the house band forever. So she pitched the idea to him and he happened to be a fan of it. And so, with the fuel of stubborn determination, Dangerous Surrender was born.