(This chapter is just to introduce my main character, so don't be outraged when you don't recognize anything just yet. If you notice any obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, don't kill me. I finished writing this a 3:30 in the morning. Also, it's very long for some reason, so please don't kill me for that too. It will get good I promise! Oh, and please be so kind as to review! Thx! Off to bed... grumble Stupid work in the morning...)

Chapter One: It Began With a Dare...

"It's your turn Yoshe!" Six little girls sat around a low table laden with empty soda cans and open candy packages. Magazines depicting older girls in their latest fashions also littered the table, as well as nail polish, lipstick, and whatever else the 10-year-olds could find that they thought made them look older. Five of them giggled as the smallest of the group narrowed her ebony eyes in suspicion. Her piercing gaze was fixed on the one who had spoken, a skinny girl with dark brown hair cut in an almost boyish fashion. The girl smiled mischievously.

"Don't glare at me! It's your turn fair and square. "

"I know it's my turn, that's not why I'm glaring at you." Yoshe said indignantly. "It's just that you've got that look in your eyes, meaning you've thought of a dare I'm really not going to like." The girls giggled again. A tall girl at the other end of the table with long black hair clapped her hands together excitedly.

"This is gonna be good! You always think of good things Kiko!"

"Yeah!" Agreed the girl next to her. "Make Yoshe do something really embarrassing!"

"Shut up Akako!" Yoshe yelled, throwing a pillow across the room.

"Oh, it's a good one all right." Said Kiko, a sly look in her golden brown eyes. All the girls except for Yoshe leaned toward Kiko in anticipation, as if awaiting a verdict. "Yoshe, you have to call up Genyo Ozawa and tell him what color of underwear you have on!" All the girls practically fell over laughing, as Yoshe's eyes widened and her normally pale cheeks flared a bright crimson.

"No way!" She yelled ferverently. "That's' the worst dare ever! I won't do it! I absolutely refuse!"

Genyo Ozawa was the single most popular boy at Mudabachi Elementary School. He was one of those stereotypical types that all the girls liked: good at sports, smart, and cute. Kiko thought him to be stuck up, whiney, and boring, and didn't understand the heartsickness that afflicted most of her female classmates. Yoshe happened to have a very big crush on him.
Kiko stood calmly and walked over to the phone. She picked it up and practically shoved it in Yoshe's face. Yoshe shook her head aggressively, her pigtails whooshing back and forth like whips.

"You can't refuse!" Laughed the girl next to her. "We all have to do something stupid! I had to eat a cigarette butt!" Yoshe looked at the girl, her face still a bright red.

"That's nothing compared to this! This is mortifying! This is the worst thing-" She was stopped short when Kiko slapped a hand over her mouth.

"Oh come on already!" She said as she dialed dream boy's number on the phone and put it up to Yoshe's ear. "It's already ringing, so now you have no choice!" Yoshe's glare could probably have melted flesh and bone alike as she held the phone up to her ear. Kiko had to hold a hand over her own mouth to keep herself from laughing out loud at her friend's expression. The other girls giggled quietly to each other as they waited for Genyo to answer his phone. All of them hushed instantly when they heard a voice on the other line.

"Um, uh... hih Genyo. This is Yoshe Sakamoto from school. What? Oh, I'm fine. How are, um, you doing? That's good. Well actually, I wanted to tell you that... that um... I'm a... I'm wearing... p-pink underwear!" There was an eruption of laughter when she spoke those last words. Yoshe clicked the phone off and chucked it at Kiko's head.

"There! You happy! Now he probably thinks I'm a total idiot!" The phone struck Kiko on her shoulder, but it didn't seem to have any effect on her. She, along with the rest of the girls, was laughing nearly to the point of tears. Yoshe fumed miserably as she waited for the din to die down. When it finally did, she pointed a condemning finger at Kiko, her glare still fully intact.

"Now it's your turn missy!" Kiko just shrugged and took a sip from her grape soda.

"I don't care. Pick something for me to do. Nothing really bothers me that much." The moment the words left her mouth, and she saw the look of cocky inspiration on Yoshe's usually docile features, Kiko knew she might actually be in trouble.

"Oh really Miss Tough. Then you won't have any trouble playing a little game of Bloody Mary in the bathroom... mirror." Yoshe's eyes gleamed triumphantly as she saw Kiko's face pale slightly at the word 'mirror'. The other girls glanced at each other.

"What's bloody Mary?" Asked the tall girl. Kiko swallowed and tried to keep her face passive. She didn't have any idea what "Bloody Mary" was either, but it's obviously having something to do with mirrors put her immediately on edge.

"It's a game I heard about from someone at school. You have to turn all the lights off in the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror. When your eyes adjust, you have to stare at your reflection in the mirror and say "Bloody Mary" three times." A couple of the girls glanced at each other nervously. "It's said that when you get to the third time, Bloody Mary herself will jump out of the mirror and grab you." A few of the girls gasped and began chattering to each other about what a scary dare that was. Kiko paled even more, and her illusion of self-confidence flickered for just a moment. Yoshe caught it and laughed tauntingly.

"I got you! You're scared to do this dare, admit it! But it's payback time, so don't even think about refusing!" Kiko shook her head and smiled slyly back at her friend. Her color had not improved.

"I'm not afraid to do it." She stood up and headed toward the bathroom door. The girls got up and started to follow her.

"This sounds scary Kiko." Said a girl who had gone a bit overboard with the lipstick."What if Bloody Mary grabs you and we never see you again?" The tall girl rolled her eyes.

"Yeah right Mei. It's just some stupid story someone made up. It's not real." Kiko nodded agreement to reassuring comments that she barely heard over the pounding of her own heart as she opened the bathroom door. She flicked on the light and looked inside. The mirror was a small one that doubled as a cabinet over the sink. She turned around to face her friends again. Yoshe stood at the front of the group with her arms folded across her chest. She smiled sweetly, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.

"If you aren't scared, then this should be no problem right?"Kiko's stomach tightened in a knot inside of her. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she smiled again in the same self-assured way.

"Of course. No problem at all." With that, she walked into the bathroom. Slowly, she turned to face the mirror. She wanted to close her eyes, but knew that all the girls were watching her with rapt attention. She could still see Yoshe gloating from the doorway, and her almost fear-filled mind made room for irritation.

Dang it. She thought. Why did I ever tell you that I was afraid of mirrors? I should have known that you would use it against me! Well, actually I did tell you in the first grade, when I didn't' t think it would matter. But still. Oh, this makes me mad. But I guess this is actually what I get for playing by my own rules...

She swallowed down nothing in her dry throat as she peered into the mirror. There. The first one. Her eyes flicked to the top right corner of the mirror just in time to see a tiny, glowing red dot disappear. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment before she could look again.

This is what she saw every time she looked in the mirror. Shadows. Glowing lights. Things people told her weren't really there. She didn't get why no one else could see them, but when her parents began to talk about some kind of therapy for her, she stopped telling everyone about them. But that didn't make them go away. She still saw them almost every time. Sometimes they formed enough to makes discernable shapes and figures, sometimes even faces. Those were the ones that terrified her. The kind that kept her up at night sometimes, their images popping into her nightmares. So far this time all she had seen was the little annoying glowy kind that didn't like to be looked at. Most of them were like that, but the glowing ones were the fastest. She took another deep breath and looked back up into the mirror.

Her last thought before Yoshe turned the lights off was one that she had thought thousands of times throughout her young life.

What are they?

Then the room plunged into darkness. Her eyes adjusted and she found herself peering into her own fear-filled eyes. She took another deep breath, then saw herself open her mouth to speak.

"Bloody Mary." She heard a few hushed remarks form her friends outside the door. She breathed in, then let the breath out slowly.

"Bloody Mary." There was more whispering, but Kiko was concentrating to hard on trying to ignore the strange shadow forming directly behind her in the mirror. She felt something almost like a tickle in her mind, like something was crawling around inside. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end as the shadow continued to grow. Every instinct told her to run out of the bathroom. Something about this was not right. But all her friends were watching, and she was almost done. She watched her own eyes widen as she took in another deep breath.

"Bloody Mary." What happened next was only in a span of about five seconds. The tickle in her mind was replaced with a searing vice. Her hands tightly gripped the sink as the overwhelming pain engulfed her terrified mind in flames. She was still watching herself in the mirror, and could see the shadow that had been behind her wrapping itself around her. Mortified, and frozen solid from pain and shock, she watched as the shadow seeped into her.Then the mirror shattered, sending shards of glass flying across the tiny room. Kiko was thrown back against the wall and crumpled to the floor.

There was only a feeling of numbness in her body and mind before she slipped away into a darkness that no light switch could ever reproduce.

Kiko awoke hours later to a rather irritating beeping sound that repeated itself about every second. She opened leaden eyes to a world of gray shadows. She was laying down on something soft, and covered with a warm blanket. She looked up to see a screen with little green lines zigzagging across it to the sound of the beep. A moment of confusion crossed her mind before she realized she was in a hospital bed. She sat up with a groan as several spots on her body burned dully. She looked to see that she covered in bandages.

The glass. She remembered. The image of the shattering mirror flitted across her mind. What happened?

She swung herself sideways as if to get out of bed. Instantly pain flared up in her head and a feeling of dizziness caused her to fall back down onto the bed. She gasped aloud as the pain brought back her memory. Yoshe. The dare. The mirror. The shadow. Bloody Mary. The pain. The pain...

She wriggled herself back into the position she had originally been in and laid her head down onto the pillow. She placed a hand on her throbbing forehead. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly in a vein attempt to stop the flow of hot tear that welled up in her eyes. She sobbed quietly to herself, in pain and confused about what had happened.

"Pathetic aren't you."

Kiko's eyes shot open and she took her hand away from her forehead. She scanned the dark room for the source of the voice, but saw no one. The room was empty.

"Um.. who's there?" She asked in a quiet voice. She realized her throat was very dry. When no one answered right away, she looked down on the side of the bed for a call button. She had seen people do that in the movies. She found a button labeled 'NURSE' and pressed it.

"You can't be very old. Around ten maybe?"

Kiko looked up again, this time fear making it's way back into her thoughts.

"Who's there?" She asked more forcefully. Again there was no answer. The thought of a ghost made Kiko feel even more exhausted. She laid her head back down on her pillow and closed her eyes tightly to wait for the nurse.

"Murata Tokiko?" Her eyes flew open again, but this time she found herself looking at a pleasant faced young woman in a nurse's outfit. "My name is Emi. I'm your nurse right now. What did you need dear?"

"I could use some water." She said quietly. Emi smiled and walked over to a small table with a plastic water pitcher on it. She poured some water into a small cup and handed it to Kiko. She took it and drank it down. She muttered a thanks, then handed back the cup.

"Will that be all dear? I'm going to go get your parents in a moment. They're in the lobby." Kiko didn't feel like having to explain everything to her parents right now, but she was to exhausted to protest. Instead, she asked Emi to turn on the lights.

"Um, how well does sound travel here? I heard someone talking to me earlier." Emi stopped just short of the light switch and gave her a worried look.

"These rooms are fairly sound proof dear. You must have imagined it." Kiko looked down at her lap in embarrassment. She didn't want anyone to think she was crazy. But what was that voice. Emi flicked the light switch and Kiko closed her eyes to the sudden brightness.

"You're not very bright either."

Kiko's head snapped up painfully at the remark, and found herself looking into a mirror across the room from her. She stared at herself as her eyes widened in fear. The same golden brown eyes looked back at her with cold calmness, a glint of amusement in their depths.
It was her reflection. The same color of eyes. The same short brown hair. The same rounded face. Identical in every way, a mirror image. Yet her reflection was smiling at her when she herself was not smiling. In fact, it was smirking at her.

"Pathetic and stupid." Said her reflection. It's eyes narrowed, and it's grin widened wickedly. "That's just my luck."

(If you read this, well, thanks for reading! I will actually update now that I have more free time aka Senioritis... sweatdrop )