Prologue
"I'm shipping you off to America!"
Amity sat there, dumbfounded. Had someone decided to walk in on father and daughter, that someone would've assumed that poor, insane Mr. Gray was burdened with the task of explaining a complicated algebraic expression to a mentally challenged two-year old.
But he wasn't. It was Amity who was pitying herself. It wasn't the words that were so troubling. It was the way he said it.
Insane Mr. Gray (as he was often called by the children that lived in the orphanage next to the mental asylum), was beaming at his daughter, as if somebody had handed him the biggest, fattest, greasiest poultry on the table and announced that it was all his.
"Excuse me?" Amity managed to choke out.
Mr. Gray simply chuckled, pure joy twinkling in his pearly gray eyes. Amity's own gray eyes welled up with tears. She had inherited the organs from her father, as well as the way they showed everything she felt, but held a sort of mystery about them that made you wonder what secrets were held in their glassy depths. "In the morning!" he sang, not even bothering to answer his daughter's question. He knew she understood him perfectly, anyway.
"But-"
"There will be no butts!" he roared. He scowled for a second, his nostrils flaring and eyes smoldering, before his face crumpled into hysterics. "Butts!"
Under normal conditions, Amity would've rolled her eyes at her father's immature amusement. But these were not normal conditions.
"Where will I stay?" she said, her face straight as a board. She was rather used to things like this. Ever since he had been diagnosed with a rare, harmless mental disease that Amity couldn't pronounce, he was prone to childishness and sporadic ideas. He once attempted to eat a young child. (Hence why he was in an insane asylum.) But, luckily for all humanity, his ideas were rarely thought through. When they were, he made sure they were enforced.
"With Tata!"
'Crud.' Amity cursed her father's eccentricity. 'He's serious.'
With a sigh, Amity bowed her head and nodded.
"Fantastic!" he sang, and reached over to call for assistance. "Would a tall, strapping young man come and help my beautiful daughter load her things on the jet? She's going to America in the morning! Yippie!" He hung up the call line, and looked expectantly at the door. Even before is illness, Mr. Gray was always a man who liked to be answered quickly. The only difference his condition made was that he would throw a terrible tantrum if he wasn't.
Just like clockwork, a man was at the door in heartbeats.
"Goodbye, my dearest, darlingest Amity!" he waved, leaning back on his pillow. A nurse walked in, clipboard in hand and looking thoroughly distressed. Amity got up to leave.
As she was being escorted out, her father's merry voice floated after her. "Have fun with true love!"
'Now what,' she wondered, 'could he possibly mean by that?!'