Hey guys, this is my first try at this on this sight. Hopefully everyone loves it! I would love to see some reviews and comments on how you like the first chapter so far! I'm excited to be able to write for everyone.
Don't worry, J will appear in chapter two. I just wanted to give a very clear image of what our leading lady has been through up until now.
Chapter One: Welcome Home
Roman emperors used to wear Tyrian purple, specifically made to be resistant to fade. At that time, it was worth more than its weight in gold. Someone once told me that ten thousand crushed shells would amount to one ounce of the "royal purple" dye. It was rare, expensive, and challenging to make, and that's why it historically became exclusive to royals.
Funny, that's one of the only things I recall from History class. A meaningless fact about the color purple. Four years of world history. I slept that time away, but for good reason. Though, now it seems like destiny. It seems like everything that I've done throughout my entire life has been meticulously planned by a higher being. My mother used to say that everything ahs a meaning, and everything happens for a reason. Part of me wishes she was wrong, and a lot of me is thankful that she was right.
THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO
Everything came back to me like a tsunami. I felt attacked by my emotions. I couldn't quite gather my thoughts, and I couldn't remember what happened or where I was. The nausea hit me, and I could feel the red hot tingle that morphine left in the back of my throat. My hands and body were heavy, and I felt like I cheated death. I finally pried my eyes open through sheer will, and was instantly overwhelmed by the whiteness. It was bright and reminded me of a flash of lightning after your eyes already acclimated to the dark. An instant migraine set in, and I got a halo of blurriness around the edge of my vision. I didn't see her come in, but I sure heard her.
"My BABY! Are you OKAY? I've been SO WORRIED about you!"She comes in hot, waving her arms around like she's on a roller-coaster. Her eyes dart around to see if there are any nurses in the room, and she cools off her "perfect grandma" persona and quickly loses her smile and forcefully plops down, as if her act is exhausting. I stared at her blankly and wondered if she was really this desperate for attention, or if I was still groggy from the heavy pain meds. Just then a nurse knocks at the door and she goes from nervous to-
"Thank WONDERFUL JESUS you're OKAY! I was so worried about you! We got you flowers and candy!" I look around and there are three vases full of flowers, and a red solo cup full wild flowers. I took a wild guess which one was from her.
"We?"
"Well…your friends had some things delivered." Delivered. So they didn't stop by. In the trashcan beside the guest chair, there were gourmet chocolate boxes stacked five high. I gave her a look and she tries to avoid my gaze.
"Wonder where all the chocolate went." I said flatly. I wasn't mad, I'm not a sweets person. But it's kind of salty for her to take things addressed to me while I'm laying here unconscious.
"Well, I didn't think you'd be eating them any time soon." She says it with a feigned guilty smile on her wrinkled face. The look on her face says she feels bad, but her track record says otherwise. She will take and take to benefit her and then pretend she's sorry when she's caught or confronted. She's scheming.
"That's fine, who were they from?" I ask and she glances down.
"Did…you throw away the cards?" I get a glimpse of her light blue eyes for a second, and she nods her head before she speaks.
"I think one of them was from your friend…" She trailed off.
"So…you opened my cards?" I stared her in the face, something that I usually avoided. As I dared to look her in the eyes she gave me a defiant smile. Her eyes flashed and she cocked her head with a plotting gaze.
"Well, your doctor says you need to be monitored. So I took the liberty of opening all your mail at home, too." She stared at me with a look that said "test me".
My "doctor". She means my Psychiatrist. She hated that word, probably because she knew she needed one. Perhaps afraid that if she accidentally said it three times one would appear to ask her "how do you feel about that" and smother her in medications that make you a zombie. Like they were doing to me. I lifted my arm to try to get a class of water, but the aching in my wrist stopped me. I felt like I was made of glass. As if at any moment, with one wrong move, I would shatter. I checked the gauze on my wrists, and it appeared as though I had re-opened the stitches.
The cuts were deep, and I had made them intentionally. I wanted to die. Corinna made my life hell. Her ever-changing personality made me nauseous. She saw me struggling to get a drink, and before I could push the nurse button she brought a glass of water to my face and bent the straw. I eyed her before drinking. She wouldn't dare put anything in my water at the hospital. She's have to be…crazy.
"There's nothing but water in there dammit! Drink it! Wouldn't want the nurses to think I was abusing you, would we? Can't let you dehydrate." The smug look on her face made me want to hit her. I couldn't remember a time that she wasn't abusing me. Since the day I turned fourteen she's been torturing me and manipulating situations to ensure I was caught in her vice. She wanted to control me. She, for some reason, wanted to keep me around. Perhaps it was because in her sick, twisted mind she needed someone to torture, someone to take out all of her anger on.
I was never a happy child. I would always complain to my mother that everything hurt. Not physically, and it didn't take her long to understand what I meant. Nothing was fair in this world and it hurt. Your success was determined by how much old money you were born into, and new money depended upon how hot you were or how many men you slept with to get to the top.
Gotham city. The place of billionaires and mobsters. Where infamy is equal to fame. Such a diverse population divided into two categories. Good and bad. The home of the Batman. The playground of the Joker. The force of good, and the curse of evil. My mother moved here before I was born, because everything made sense to her. Karma got people. There was justice. The good ole days of Gotham where you were punished for your crimes and rewarded for your good deeds. That's not the Gotham I live in today. I life in a city of havoc, chaos, and a ceaseless fight between good and evil.
But actually, that's the way I like it.
Welcome to Gotham.
. . .
I was released from the hospital the next day. My grandmother drove us back to the run-down two bedroom apartment. I threw my backpack onto the old couch and made a B-line to my room.
"NOT so fast." I knew it was coming. What was supposed to be a wake-up call ended up being another reason for me to be punished. She sprinkled rice down in the corner near the door. The sight of rice made my stomach turn. I already had almost a hundred white dashes of scar tissue sprinkling my knees. She uttered the words that made me want to disappear.
"Kneel." I hesitated, and in an instant she appeared next to me and took a fistful of my hair. "KNEEL little girl or I will make this SO much worse." The blue in her eyes faded to a smoldering grey and I did as she told. As I knelt down, the all too familiar sensation of the rice cutting into my knees swept through my body as blood trickled over the floor. There was much more blood than usual. Only I noticed.
"YOU EMBARRASSED me! Is this not good enough for you?" She grabbed me by the hair once again and slammed my hair into the wall. "I have given you EVERYTHING!" She annunciates the end of every word by slamming my head repeatedly into the wall. My nose is flowing blood, and it won't stop. She bends down to take a closer look at my face. The smell of her breath nauseates me. I try to put my hands up in defense but my wrists feel like they're going to detach from my arms.
"Don't you EVER try that SHIT again, you hear me, you PIECE. Of. SHIT?" She ends the sentence with spitting in my face. I wipe my face with the lower part of my white t-shirt and she gets closer, her voice shaking with fury. "You're going to make people think I'm CRAZY. Trying to kill yourself?" She scoffs, as if it were the dumbest thing she's ever heard. "Your life here isn't that bad. Believe me, I've given people a lot worse to live with." That was a threat, and I knew it.
Two hours later, I was finally allowed to get up. Mt knees locked and I was dizzy from all the blood loss. The linoleum was stained brown. She eyed me as she handed me tweezers and a bowl of bleach with a sponge. After I dug all of the rice out of my knee, I was expected to scrub the floor and rid it of all the blood stains. Upon getting the floor as clean as I possibly could, I crawled into my bed and wept until early morning.
"I just want my mom back" I whispered to myself in the dark.
Ah, home sweet home.