A/N: So I was thinking about how fun it would be to write something for KH along the lines of Go Ask Alice, everyone's favorite 1971 "nonfiction" diary about a fifteen-year-old girl who descends into the world of drugs. Add that with my fascination with MarluxiaxNamine, "stoner" music, and the need to learn how to write about drugs, and you get this. I know I didn't change the name, but you'll see why when I get there. Anyway, I hope I didn't butcher this, and since this is a chaptered thing, let's hope I can update it on time, yeah? (Chapters will be pretty short, just to make it easier for me to get them going.)

So the usual warnings for a story like this apply: please look out for/be aware of the following elements, drugs, sex, rock and roll, prostitution, statutory rape, kidnappings, teasing, hazing, and all that other good stuff that is out there in the wide world of Real Life. Leave a review if you can; constructive criticism on how I'm handling these topics is huge, since I haven't touched them in my own right; only read about them. On with the show!

go ask alice
one
lucy in the sky with diamonds

Today is Naminé's birthday.

She's fifteen.

The confetti swirls around her, the cake is chewed-swallowed-digested, the presents are unwrapped: new paints and sketchpads and things she needs to draw, but she can hardly summon up a thank you and it's all she can do to kiss her father and mother good night.

She's fifteen.

It's her birthday.

She should be so, so happy.

And she feels nothing.

---

It's been like that since she moved away from the house where she grew up. But her father had been offered a job he couldn't turn down, not when it was an opportunity for the girls to get a better education and to get further in life.

Naminé's elder-prettier-skinnier-brighter sister Kairi thrived in her new school. Once she found a place on the cheerleading team, she was unstoppable. And after she integrated herself into a group of Miss Teen USAs and jocks, nobody even remembered the other girl, the one in white Kairi used to be around with.

For Kairi, the world is sunshine and tangerine trees and marmalade skies; Namine only sees fog drifting in that never really leaves.

It got really hard after Kairi had to tell one of her new friends, in front of Naminé, that the girl in the white dress wasn't a friend, but was actually her own sister.

"Really?" he asked, this cheerful but forgetful boy named Tidus, his smile faltering, fading. "I really didn't know. I would've thought your sister would be a lot different. Sorry, Kai."

Because nobody really understood how anybody could be as quiet as Naminé was, or draw as much as she did, all the while refusing invitations out when Kairi's friends tried to accept her, too.

But she wasn't one of them. She knew it, and she didn't want their sympathy. She wanted to be accepted for herself, not for the blood she shared with Kairi.

She just kept drawing and drawing herself, happy, happy with new friends and new faces and new dreams to chase in the sky.

And when she sleeps, she dreams it's true, and wakes up with tears on her face.

---

She's so sick for home. She hates it at her new school, in her new place where nobody really gives a shit about her unless they're somehow connected to Kairi. She seems destined to fall away altogether, eating lunch on a toilet, fading into the white white walls whenever she sits in class.

Her grandparents are the ones to offer her a place in the guest-room in their house. She cries and cries because she's so happy, and though she tells her mom and dad and Kairi that she may be back before long, she hopes she'll be able to stay forever.

---

Under the jurisdiction of her grandparents, she's given free rein of her old hometown, allowed to go wherever she likes as long as she's home for meals, or calls beforehand so that no extra food is made for her. The town is hers to see, hers to remember.

And when she passes by the familiar street corners, people ask her if she's really home, if she's really Namine, and she smiles and says yes, yes it is.

Yes, she says, I'm home.

She spends her days trying on pretty dresses in tiny boutiques and browsing the CD aisles in the hopes of something new and working out to make her stomach go flat, the way it was as a child. But most of all, she draws things in the local park for the little kids who ask, and who sometimes even pay, for her to make a paper dream for them. She becomes known as the girl underneath the tangerine tree, the one who will draw just about anything you ask for.

And she couldn't be happier.

---