I know that I am not the only one that turns my face skyward, wishing that aliens were real. Unfortunately, they aren't; not in the way we wish they were. I am Cori, and I am an alien of a different sort—an illegal immigrant. I was brought to the US as an infant, smuggled here in my mother's suitcase on her quest to meet her husband. She was young, a mail-order bride to a wealthy man in Gotham City; I was his unwanted dowry, the child he'd never even imagined existed.
When my would-have-been stepfather saw me, his reception was indicative of that of the rest of this city—"Get rid of it." I like to think that my mother loved me, and that is why she found herself incapable of killing me; more likely she was just weak. Instead, she handed me off to her husband's housekeeper and swore her to secrecy.
All this I know from the housekeeper, Freya, who was my true mother. She named me (Coriander, for her favorite spice), raised me to the best of her abilities, and hid my existence from everyone; my mother, who no doubt assumed I'd been thrown out with the trash, my invisible stepfather, who has likely forgotten that I ever existed, and my two half-siblings, the twins Connie and Ryan, who have no idea that my mother was a mother before them.
Mor Freya was an immigrant herself, a Norwegian grandmother turned housekeeper in search of citizenship, and she did not speak English well. She taught me what she could. My education, if you could even call it that, was spotty at best. The public schools in Gotham all required a social security numbers. The private schools didn't care, if you could afford the school, but Mor Freya could not. I knew my numbers in Norwegian and English, and I was fluent in Norwegian. I'd read classic Norwegian literature, when I'd had time. I could cook, I could clean, I could sew.
I had never seen a map. I had no idea how much of America there was in the world, and on the whole, I didn't care. I'd never known anything different from my life with Mor Freya, and I never wanted to.
It didn't matter what I wanted, though. The year I turned ten, the world shifted so quickly that I was knocked off my feet. Mor Freya grew ill, the way that old women displaced from home seem to, and she was forced into retirement from her housekeeping job. With still no citizenship and failing health, she couldn't afford to seek the help she needed—she couldn't even afford the apartment we lived in anymore. She died the same day the landlord came to evict us.
She pressed a wad of bills into my hand, the very last of the money we had, and whispered to me as the landlord came up the stairs outside our door, "Løp, kjære." I hesitated, and the landlord was knocking on the door. She pushed me towards the fire escape, using the last of her strength to push me. "Løp!" I obeyed, going out the ladder and down the stairs. On the platform, I looked back, and watched as the landlord checked her for a pulse.
I never knew that he saw me, but he did. Years later, I learned that they declared Mor Freya murdered, their prime suspect a bedraggled child that was witnessed fleeing the scene. I suppose, in retrospect, this could be considered my first brush with what some like to call the "criminal element."
The money Mor Freya gave me didn't last long. A ten year old needs more than 12$ to survive, and food is expensive. It wasn't long before I found myself alone in Gotham, barefoot and bedraggled, standing alone in the rainy night. Days passed.
I wandered through streets I'd never seen before, unable to read their names or ask for help. People pushed me out of their way, unable or unwilling to spare more than a glance and a push for a minute girl in their way. My shoes were stolen the first night that I was on the streets, removed from my feet while I slept. This terrified me, so I stopped sleeping. If I hadn't been found when I was, I would have died.
As it was, it was a close thing. I was crouched in an alley. I didn't know what day it was or how long it had been since Freya died. Shivering and barely conscious, I couldn't even recoil when I was approached.
To my ten year-old self, the boy that approached looked like a man. He was tall, maybe fifteen or sixteen, a black leather jacket on his shoulders, a half-smoked cigarette in his hand, his strawberry blonde hair hanging into his dark, dangerous eyes. He watched me from across the alley as he finished his cigarette. I watched him back, unsure what to expect—no one else had even acknowledged me in so long that I was half-convinced I no longer existed.
Finished, he flicked the butt away and stepped closer.
"Hey, kid," his voice was rough, the way it gets when you've been smoking for years. Despite the danger that emanated from his form, his voice was indescribably kind. It didn't matter, my English wasn't good enough to recognize the colloquialism when I heard it.
"I-I am not a g-goat." I managed to choke out around teeth that were chattering louder than my voice. His sharp laughter echoed off of the bricks around us, reflecting off of the puddles on the ground and back into the foggy air, knives thrown carelessly.
"Do you have a farm, little goat?" He asked, concern in his voice. He was moving closer, and as I shook my head, he caught my wrist in his hand. He pulled me to my feet by my wrist. Even when I stood, he towered over me. "That's what I thought." His eyes roamed over my body, sizing me up. He took in my orange hair, my green eyes dulled by sleeplessness and hunger, the way my body was only barely containing my bones, and my dirty feet. "Do you have a name, little goat?" Intimidated but comforted at the same time, I responded immediately.
"Coriander." He looked into my face, searching for something. Finding it, he turned away and walked toward the street, pulling me behind him, a docile goat returning home from the market.