My name is Cassie.
That could be a lie. And I won't tell you my last name. Or where I live. Not for security reasons; if you've found this journal then that means you already know who I am. Or it means that the war is over, and it's safe for me to release this to the public. In either case, with the information in here, merely hiding my name and location would not protect us.
I won't tell you who I am because it is irrelevant. It does not matter if you love or hate us. It does not matter if we live next door to you or on the other side of the world. If the war is over then I'm sure that whatever the media has said about us is a lie. It might a lie in our favour, depending on how things turned out, but I doubt very much that anything you've been told is the whole truth. This is the whole truth; this is what happened to a nameless, locationless, thirteen year old human girl.
It's hard to know where some stories really start. This is not one of those stories. This story started one Friday night, when I was at the mall with Rachel. She was dragging me between sales racks, looking for a very specific cut of jeans that probably didn't exist.
"They're not here," I moaned for about the twentieth time. "We looked. We tried. Let's go home."
She shot me a pitying look. "Do you always give up so easily?"
"Only when the task is pointless."
"We had a deal. I help you clean your dad's barn on Thursday. You come shopping with me on Friday."
I sighed. "When did we become so different?" But she was right; a deal was a deal. And she had helped me clean the barn.
She pulled a pair of jeans from a display bench and held them against her own waist with a thoughtful frown. I could tell from her expression that they weren't the cut she was looking for, but nevertheless she looked at me. "Thoughts?"
I looked her up and down. Tall, athletic Rachel with her long, straight blonde hair braided in what looked like a normal braid to me but was probably some super-fashionable revolution in hair-twisting, wearing a pale blue top that I was sure I'd find in the most prominent and well-regarded fashion magazines if I should care to look, posing with what looked to me like any other pair of jeans.
"You look great," I said. "You always look great. Can we go now?"
"Do you mean that, or are you trying to cut this shopping trip short?"
"... both?"
Rachel looked like she was going to respond, but her eyes caught sight of something behind me and lit up. "A-ha!" She reached around me and grabbed a hanger. Upon the hanger was another pair of jeans, looking basically the same as the pair she was holding. "Found them. I'm just going to try these on real quick, ok?"
"I'll be here."
She gave me a little wave as she headed for the changing rooms, carrying herself with that sort of undefinable grace that she always carried about her like an aura. "Undefinable", that is, unless you know the secret, which is that she's a gymnast. Too tall to ever pull it off professionally, she says, but it lends her a certain balance and poise.
I found a display of chunky plastic accessories to pick through while she changed. Both physically and in terms of personality, I'm the antithesis of Rachel; she's tall and pale, I'm short and black. She wears her hair very long, I wear mine very short. Her outfits are color-coordinated and cut to her body shape, I consider the concept of 'outfit' to be unnecessary. Clothes are clothes. The body's just a tool to carry the mind around in, anyway. Why spend huge amounts of time trying to decorate it? To draw the attention of jerks who thought that kind of thing was important?
I was considering whether I should buy a powder-blue chunky plastic bracelet for myself to make Rachel happy when I felt somebody come up behind me.
"Cassie?"
I turned to face a boy; tall, with neatly trimmed brown hair and deep, dark eyes. He gave me a crooked, slightly shy grin.
"Jake," I said. "Hi." Jake was Rachel's cousin. He was into basketball and video games instead of gymnastics and fashion, but just by looking you could tell they were cousins. I felt my own heartbeat quicken and hoped I wasn't noticeably blushing.
I might sort of have a thing for Jake.
"I thought it was you," Jake said. "How have you been?"
"Oh, fine. I was just shopping with Rachel," I said, as if I needed to justify my presence in a public mall. "She's trying on some stuff."
"We were just playing video games at the arcade." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, as if it was somehow possible I wasn't aware of the brightly lit arcade right across from the clothing shop.
"By 'playing video games'," another familiar voice said from behind a rack of clothing, "he means keeping the arcade in business with our allowances, because certain people keep forgetting that the SleazeTroll shows up right after you cross the Nether Fjord. So certain people keep losing the game – and our quarter." The speaker, a skinny, coffee-skinned boy with loose shoulder length hair who was even shorter than me, jerked his thumb at Jake in case I couldn't figure out who he meant by 'certain people'. Jake rolled his eyes.
"Nobody keeps notes on the order of appearance of monsters in arcade games, Marco," he said. "That is not normal."
"Who keeps notes? It's called paying attention to the game. It's called realising that you have three seconds after the Nether Fjord before the Troll's intro starts to begin reserving energy for your power attack, and those three seconds can save your life. It's called taking less than seven tries to realise you should be pumping energy the moment you step off the bridge."
"Oh, sure, you say that when last weekend – "
"Last weekend was a one-off. I'll prove it. Tomorrow, your place, you against me. Actually, I'll do you one better. You can have Tobias on your team." Marco jerked his thumb as a kid loitering awkwardly behind him, eyeing a rack of clothing as if it was part of some kind of trap. He stood out in the clothing shop more than I did; lanky, with unkempt dirty-blonde hair and baggy clothes that looked at least third-hand. I'd seen him hanging around Jake at school a bit, but we'd never spoken. I offered him a friendly smile. He responded with a short, somewhat friendly nod.
"They fit!" Rachel exclaimed, rushing towards me. "Both pairs!" Her eyes caught the bracelet I was trying on. "Oh, you found something. Good. It looks cute on you." She glanced up at the boys. "Hi, guys. Just let me borrow Cassie for a moment so we can pay for this stuff."
It seems so strange, looking back on it now. If I'd had any inkling what the future had in store for us…
"You guys going home?" Jake asked Rachel as she said goodbye to the cashier. "You shouldn't go through the construction site by yourselves. I mean, being girls and all."
That was a mistake.
"Are you going to come and protect us, you big, strong m-a-a-a-n?" she snapped in reply. "You think we're helpless just because – "
This was unproductive. "I'd appreciate it if they did walk with us," I interrupted. "I know you're not afraid of anything, Rachel, but I guess I am." That wasn't a lie; a small, not very strong black girl had a lot to be afraid of. Sexist or not, the fact was that we were in a lot less danger walking with three boys than we were alone. I didn't think any of us would do well in an actual fight, but a group of us were much better at avoiding one.
Rachel had no real way of objecting to that. We left, silently. Rachel, Jake, Marco, Tobias and me. At that moment, the scariest things in my life were bad grades and bullies.
Life was about to get a whole lot scarier.