Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook. Editor's note: Leland & Gray Union High School senior Emma Stover, the subject of the accompanying article, wrote this essay as a start to prompt her thinking about "her story." My name is Emma Stover and I am a senior at Leland & Gray Union High School in Townshend, Vermont. When I was 7 years old I witnessed my mother using drugs for the first time, an image that will never leave my head. My father left my mother and I at a young age, forcing us to survive and live off of what we had and the people around us. My mother financially depended on my grandparents for support, making family tensions very prominent throughout my childhood years. I was introduced to people and places that no child should ever have to witness, making me see the difficulties and hardships of life at a very young age. Inevitably I was removed from the household my mother resided in, resulting in me living with my grandparents in Jamaica, Vermont. During my sophomore year of high school my grandparents and I got a call that my mother was found unconscious on her kitchen floor; she had overdosed.