🍒 Chapter 11: Baby Got Back... Story

Cece reflects on finishing high school, popularity, and the pressure to “fit in” while living in an emotionally volatile home. She describes a highly controlled household, double standards between her and her younger brother, and how she coped by staying invisible, overly compliant, and meticulously organized. Through humorous family anecdotes and candid reflection, she shows how rebellion slowly began forming beneath the surface of a “good kid” persona.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic sexual content is included.

🍒 Chapter 10: Continuing on After the Aftermath

Cece lightens the tone with a series of funny — and painfully relatable — misadventures, while weaving in deeper themes about anxiety, phobias, and intuition. The chapter closes on a recurring dream motif tied to vintage keys, hinting that her subconscious is still processing everything she’s been through.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic sexual content is included.

🍒 Chapter 9: Flooded with Unanswered Questions

Cece's health issues become impossible to ignore as she begins experiencing “zone-outs” believed to be seizures. Medication changes, chronic pain, and a tachycardia diagnosis follow — alongside emotional abuse at home that fuels her eating disorder. The chapter honestly explores body image, secrecy, shame, and the beginning of her recovery journey.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic sexual content is included.

Cece gives a humorous yet revealing tour of her high-school dating life, crushes, and misadventures — from intense first dates to awkward breakups, church crushes, and friendships that crossed boundaries set by her father. The chapter blends comedy with deeper themes of control, identity, and safety.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic sexual content is included.

We’re moving out of childhood now — into the messy, medical, and emotional realities of growing up.

This chapter moves fully into adolescence — the awkward, painful, funny, and transformative years where bodies, identities, and relationships all seem to change at once. Cece reflects on her “glow-up,” middle-school bullying, and the complicated realities of growing up female in a culture obsessed with appearance.

Cece enters adolescence — physically, emotionally, and medically. She describes puberty, body changes, early bullying, cheerleading, dance, and the start of significant health struggles. The chapter also introduces early depression, painful medical issues, and her first job — where she experiences grooming by an older coworker before her mother intervenes.

What begins as humorous commentary on puberty gradually deepens into a more serious exploration of early mental health struggles, chronic health issues, and medical experiences that shaped her teenage years.

The chapter also introduces the first brushes with inappropriate adult attention in the workplace, hinting at patterns that will matter later in the story. By the end, Cece pauses on the edge of high school — self-aware, resilient, and ready to talk about relationships, identity, and what comes next.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic sexual content is included, but themes of inappropriate adult behavior toward a minor are present.

We’re moving forward after the fire — into the years of rebuilding and growing up.

After the fire, life doesn’t return to normal — it reorganizes itself. This chapter follows Cece through a long season of rebuilding: grandparents’ sleepovers, a temporary trailer, a new Chihuahua named Mazi, and eventually a new home, new neighborhood, and new routines.

What looks like simple nostalgia — bikes, sleepovers, skating rinks, Furbies, Mall Madness, Walkmans, and hairbrush microphones — slowly becomes a portrait of how a sensitive kid learns to cope with change.

Beneath the jokes, deeper layers emerge: the beginnings of phobias, a love of music as emotional refuge, complicated family dynamics, and a growing awareness of identity — including heritage, belonging, and how the body and brain react to the world.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic violence is depicted in this episode.

We’re still in childhood — but this is the moment everything changes.

This chapter marks the first true turning point in Dried Cherry Juice. What begins as an ordinary afternoon with Nana slowly reveals itself as something devastating — a house engulfed in flames, the loss of a beloved companion, and the shattering of childhood safety in real time.

Told through vivid sensory detail — the smell of leather seats, the smoke-filled air, the chaos of first responders — Cece captures both the immediacy of crisis and the long emotional aftermath that follows.

The episode widens from a single tragedy into deeper questions about family, hidden realities, and the battles people fight behind closed doors. This is the moment the “before” ends — and everything that comes next is shaped by it.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic violence is described, but the emotional content is heavy.

This chapter flips through Cece’s early school years like a scrapbook with teeth — a rapid-fire rundown of pre-k through sixth grade, told with humor, side quests, and an unapologetically scattered rhythm.

Along the way: picture day rebellion (feat. the infamous pink dinosaur tee shirt), childhood competitiveness, early crushes, spelling bee glory, tomboy fashion, and the oddly universal trauma of stick-on earrings. But woven through the laughs are quiet hints that memory is selective for a reason — and that some years blur because the story is inching closer to the flames.

By the end, Cece makes it clear: there are things you need to know before what happens next… happens.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No prolonged graphic content is depicted.

We’re staying in childhood — but widening the lens to the world I grew up inside.

This chapter settles fully into childhood — not as nostalgia, but as lived texture. Cece moves through memories of play, family, and personality with her signature wandering cadence: fireflies, Hot Wheels, a one-of-a-kind dollhouse, Power Rangers battles, Walmart parking lots, and a rat terrier named Itchy who was always one step behind her.

The episode paints a vivid portrait of family life in the late ’80s and ’90s — hose water, tire swings, backyard projects, chain-smoking grandparents, and a household where chaos and creativity often went hand in hand.

Beneath the playfulness, deeper threads begin to surface — belonging, identity, gender expectations, and what it meant to be “Daddy’s little girl” before that role quietly shifted.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic violence is depicted in this episode.

We’re rewinding — back to the very beginning.

This chapter rewinds to the beginning — not the trauma, but the texture of childhood before the fire. Through humor, memory, and playful digressions, Cece pieces together what she can remember (and what others remember for her) about her earliest days.

From pregnancy cravings and “late arrival” jokes to family lore, Native heritage, and oddly specific historical context, the episode blends personal origin story with a cultural snapshot of the late 1980s. Along the way, Cece leans into her signature scattered style — wandering, circling back, and dropping intentional breadcrumbs.

What begins as lighthearted storytelling gradually becomes a portrait of family dynamics, temperament, and the early sparks of a personality that refuses to stay small.

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⚠️ Potential triggers featured in this episode may include, but are not limited to:

No graphic violence is depicted in this chapter.