Killing The Cliche

by GuiltyMind

After finding out her 'parents' aren't who they say they are, Tris makes a run for it, but she can't go alone. That's where her neighbour comes in. With no place to call home, they realise that perhaps they don't need a place - just each other.

1. Chapter 1

"Killing The Cliche"

Rated T/M (sexual content, violence and language)

Chapter 1 (Tris POV)

-oo0oo-

"Hey, mom, I'm just going to go finish up my homework," I say as I finish stacking up the dishwasher, and wipe my hands on the hand towel. "I have a paper due tomorrow, and my teacher will kill me if it's not in on time."

"Of course, but dinner is ready in half an hour. Your favourite - spinach and ricotta cannelloni." Mom says, waving me away with a kind smile. I give her a nod and grab my school bag that is sitting at the foot of the staircase, then proceed to head up to my bedroom.

I push open the door and fling my backpack onto my bed. After kicking off my loosely-laced converse, I throw my long hair up into a high ponytail and sit down at my desk.

I open up my laptop and pull up my Spotify, putting my playlist on shuffle before continuing to work on my History paper, about The Civil Rights in the USA, from 1865-1992. My teacher is super strict when it comes to deadlines, and I've been good at handing all my homework in on time so far, and I don't want to stop now.

I'm pretty focused on school, you could say. I'm a straight A student, on the honour roll, and I'm taking a lot of AP classes this year to keep me busy. I also maintain a good social life, as well as my involvement in extra-curricular activities, so I have something extra to put on my CV and applications for college.

My parents have always been dead-set on me getting into Stanford University, and have been pushing me to do all this extra stuff to give me an edge on all the other applicants. I'm currently a senior, and I'll be sitting my exams in July, which means I only have a couple months to study everything. And if I don't get good grades, then I won't get into Stanford, my parents will be super disappointed, and so will I.

I guess I have a lot of pressure put on me, a lot for a seventeen-year-old, anyhow. A lot of the students in my grade don't share my motivation to succeed, and have spent their senior year gooffing off, and not paying attention in any of their classes. Which is cool, if you don't want to get a good job, or go to college, or earn a good amount of money...

I'm just glad I wasn't raised that way; if I showed any signs of slacking, my parents would jump in right away and find out what the problem was.

I can't afford to waste time admiring boys during class, when I could be spending those spare minutes paying attention and learning stuff. Call me a nerd or whatever, but I just want to make my parents proud of me. But doesn't everyone?

My cellphone buzzes in my pocket, so I pull it out to see a text message from my friend Piper, asking if I have a spare charger cable I could borrow for her phone. She has recently moved out of her parents house, after some huge disagreement, and is currently living with her boyfriend in his apartment, who attends the local college. And because of that, half of her stuff is still at her family home, which means she has to try and get by without a few things that she would usually have on hand.

How her parents would allow her to just leave like that, I have no idea. Especially as she is now living alone with a guy - my parents won't even let me go out on dates with a guy.

I text her back quickly, assuring her that I'll try and find one, but can't promise anything. So I abandon my almost-finished History paper and search through my drawers for that spare charger cable that I knew I had, but now it's nowhere to be seen.

I exit my bedroom and walk towards my parents bedroom across the hall, expecting that they probably borrowed it or something, so I'll just go get it back. I open up the door, quietly, and flick on the light.

My parents are usually pretty sketchy about me going into their room without them being there, which I've always found weird, but usually I respect their wishes. But I need to find this cable as soon as possible, so I can get back to finishing up my school work.

So I search through their nightstands, but find nothing, as well as the chest at the foot of their king-sized bed, but still I cannot find this damn cable anywhere. So I crouch down beside the bed and lie flat on my stomach so that I can pull out the junk that remains under there - perhaps they put it away by mistake, thinking it wasn't in use? It could be easily done, so it's better to check.

There is a big black box stuffed full of random, useless crap, of which is not a charger cable. So just as I'm about to give up and shove the box back under, I notice another box under their bed too. It's black, like the other, but it's smaller, and lighter.

Out of curiosity, I prise off the lid to find a stack of papers and photographs. The top piece of paperwork looks the oldest, and when I pick it up and glance at the title, my brows draw together - it's a print-out of a missing persons' website, that gives information about the people, where they were last seen, descriptions of their appearance etc.

My eyes scan over all of the descriptions, but one catches my eye. It talks about a girl who went missing when she was only three-years-old, after her whole family had been brutally murdered - and the killers have yet to be found. She is reported to have honey blonde hair, grey eyes and pale skin, as well as the fact that she is fairly skinny. It says that she would now be seventeen, and the police have given up their search, assuming that the girl is now dead.

The description oddly matches up to my appearance, just about. But I can't even make that connection; my family have not been murdered, because they're downstairs right now. So why do they have all this stuff hidden away under their bed?

I continue to look through all the papers, to find similar articles and newspaper clippings, most of them mentioning the missing girl and the murder of her family, that happened over in Chicago. As I lift the last piece of paper out of the box, I drop it onto the carpet and have to grip onto the frame of the bed so that I don't faint out of sheer panic and shock.

There is a picture of that girl, and what she would look like today.. and I know who this girl is. I recognise those dark grey eyes, that long blonde hair, the shape of her nose, the slightly heart-shaped face.

I recognise this girl because it's what I see every time I look into the mirror.

That girl, that supposedly missing girl, who's whole family was terribly murdered, looks exactly like me.

With trembling hands, I put all the papers back into the box, in what I think was the original order and push it back into the darkness underneath the bed. I stand up and rush for the door, closing it quietly behind me so that Mom doesn't hear from the kitchen, she seems to have astounding hearing - she has no trouble hearing me try to sneak downstairs during the night for a snack, as she catches me every time.

I quickly cross the hall and get back into my own room, making sure to close the door behind me. I rush back to my laptop and minimise the word document that contains my forgotten History paper and quickly open up Google.

I search up for the website address I saw on one of those print-outs, and click on the first link that pops up. It takes me straight to a website exact to the one I saw on the sheets of paper, and I click on the case that has gotten my full attention.

Reading more about it, I find out that the police found the dead family in their house a few days later, after a neighbour reported an odd smell coming from their house, and thought it was odd they hadn't attended one of their brunches, so went to check in on them. Long story short, what they found was not at all what they were expecting, and the police were called. They looked into it for years, patrolling the country, putting out Amber Alerts.. but the website says that the girl was never found, and neither were the attackers who killed the man, woman and five-year-old boy.

The case remains open, but a reporter states that it seems even the officials have given up hopes, seeing as the criminals had left no trace, meaning they are rather intelligent - not many people can get away with murder, especially not a homicide of this magnitude. So they think the girl was killed shortly after being abducted, thrown in a ditch somewhere, or possibly even fed to a wild animal.

There's a picture attached to the article, of a young blonde girl, cuddling a toy rabbit, with part of its left ear missing, and my blood runs cold.

Scrambling away from my desk, I run to my walk-in closet and use my small shoe box to reach the top shelf, above my clothing rail. Pulling down the floral-printed box, I quickly rip away the lid and fish through the contents before finding it. Finding the toy I was obsessed with for all of my childhood, as far as I can remember.

A grey bunny, with a chunk missing out of its left ear.

This is all too weird. How can this be a coincidence? The fact that they own those clippings and have them hidden away, and that the girl looks a lot like me, and that I own the exact same toy. None of it adds up.

But.. if I really am the girl in the pictures and the article, and my family really is dead.. then who are those people I'm living with and have been calling Mom and Dad?

"Tris, dinner is ready! Come down here and set the table please." Mom calls up the stairs. Or should I even call her that?

No - I'm getting ahead of myself here. I need to relax and take a deep breath; clearly there is some kind of answer to all of this, and I just have to stay calm and figure out what that is. But for now, I'll go downstairs and act normal, and then I can start searching up more stuff about what really happened fourteen years ago.

So I put the box back up on the top shelf, walk out of my closet, and then shove my grey bunny under my pillow. I exit all tabs on my laptop and turn it off, before straightening my shirt and walking out into the hall.

In the kitchen, Mom is serving up the cannelloni onto plates, and Dad is cutting up pieces of french baguette for us all to eat. They smile at me, and I do my best to offer one back before going to the cutlery draw and taking out the right amount of knives and forks for everybody. I lay them out correctly on the table, and then take my usual place.

A heaping plate of cannelloni is placed in front of me, as well as a glass of lemonade, but I wait until both of my parents have sat down to eat. Just as I always do. Mom says it's polite to wait until everybody is ready to eat, so I do. Even at school, or when I'm out to dinner with friends. It's became a habit now, I guess.

"So, how was school today, Tris?" Dad asks me as we all start to dig into the homemade meal, but I don't have much of an appetite anymore.

"Good," I respond. "I got an A+ on my Chemistry mock exam, and we got assigned partners for our next Art project."

"And who did you get partnered with?"

"Four Eaton." I say, taking a small sip of lemonade, cringing as it burns my throat.

"Eaton?" My Mom echoes. "You mean the Eaton's who live nextdoor? I had no idea that their son was in your Art class!"

"Yeah, he's actually kind of talented," I say, shrugging. "It'll be fun to work with him." If he ever decides to stop being a buzz kill, I add silently.

I wasn't lying when I said Four was talented in Art, he really is. But he's not much fun to work with, I must admit. He's sort of a loner around school, and he rarely talks to anybody unless necessary. A lot of the girls think he's extremely good looking, which is true. But he's never interested in pursuing any of them, even the popular girls like Lauren Walker. But maybe this project can help bring him out of his shell a little. Maybe.

We spend the rest of dinner talking lightly, and my parents initiate into their own conversation regarding politics, and it's at that point that I stand up and start to gather up the empty plates, as a good excuse to leave the room.

I place them beside the sink since the dishwasher is still on from when I filled it earlier on, and then I get out the wine glasses from the cupboard above the blender. This'll keep them busy enough to let me be alone in my room for an hour or two, without them interrupting. After taking through the glasses and what I know to be my Mom's favourite wine, I excuse myself upstairs and quickly get back to what I was doing before I was called downstairs.

I sit down on my desk chair again, and pull up the picture of the girl holding the bunny on my laptop, and compare it to the one in my hand. They're identical. From the dodgy ear, to the small tear in its right leg. I'm trying as hard as I can to try and think of some kind of logical explanation to all of this, but I can't think of anything.

None of this makes sense - hypothetically, is this really is me, then how have those people downstairs convinced me that I am their daughter? And how did I get with them in the first place? Could they have made some deal with the people who took me? Or.. they could be the people who took me and murdered what could hypothetically be my whole family.

It sounds crazy, absurd, deranged, insane. But that's what makes me all the more convinced. It could explain the lack of pictures of me as a child, and why there are no pictures of me posted online. They have refused to let me have social media, which means I cannot contact anybody through the internet, only texting. And unlike other parents, they do not own Facebook, so they cannot post proud pictures of me on there either, like I've seen a lot of other parents to do to their kids.

I always thought they just preferred not to get involved with all the gadget stuff, but could there really be another reason? Like they don't want anyone to find out where I am, or that I'm still alive. It was their idea to call me Tris when I started school instead of Beatrice. And it cannot be a coincidence that the missing girl had the same name as me, can it? That doesn't just happen by chance.

Those people, just a floor below me, could be guilty of a very serious act of homicide, which would earn them both a life sentence, if not a couple. I've slept only a few rooms away from them this whole time. That fact makes me want to burst into tears. I feel like everything I've ever known has just been pulled out from under me.

I want to convince myself that this is all a joke, that I'm just paranoid. But there's no other reason for any of these similarities, and it is not any coincidence, that's for sure.

I go over to my bed and quickly empty the contents of my backpack out so that it is empty. I wrap my laptop up in a t-shirt for extra protection and slide it into my backpack, as well as a few pairs of leggings, a sweatshirt and a couple t-shirts. As well as a bunch of underwear and socks, and other necessities that I'll need to keep me going for a few days.

I can't stay here. Not under the same roof as two complete strangers, who until now, were thought to be my parents.

I put in my phone too, along with my usual charger and a portable one, just in case. I throw a grey hooded sweatshirt on over what I'm wearing, and slip my converse back on, lacing them up tightly.

I exit my room and stand out in the hall, thinking over my options. I can go and confront them about exactly what I've found, or I could lie and tell them I'm going over to the Eaton's to work on the Art project, or I could sneak out before they could stop me. I decide to confront them, and give them a chance to explain; I may be overreacting, and I should hear them out, at least. But if it goes wrong and I prove to be right, it could get ugly, and I need to be able to protect myself.

So I take a quick trip into the office at the end of the hall and find the key that's hidden under the potted-plant in the corner, which unlocks the safe in the corner which holds most of our savings and a pistol, for emergency situations, such as home invasions.

I pocket some of the money, at least, the amount I think is mine, which is most of it considering all my money I've been given from holidays and birthdays have been deposited in there so I could save up for a car. But this is more important.

I also take out the pistol and slip it into the waistband of my black skinny jeans, and pull my hoodie over it, so that it isn't visible, but easy to accesss if needed - I'm not sure what to expect when I go down there, so I need to be prepared for anything.

I pause for a moment at the top of the stairs before walking down, gripping onto the rail so I don't fall, seeing as my legs are so shaky. The last step creaks as my foot hits it, and I inhale sharply.

"Tris, is that you?" I hear 'Dad' call from the kitchen.

I grit my teeth and go to the kitchen, and find them washing up at the sink, side by side. "What's with the bags, sweetheart?" He asks, frowning as he looks over my attire, especially at the rather full backpack.

"Don't call me that." I say, firmly, my fists clenched.

"What are you talking about? Is something wrong?" Mom asks, looking concerned.

But it's all a scam, isn't it? The sick fuckers. I know as I look at them in this moment that they are exactly who I think they are. They are no parents of mine.

"Am I your daughter?" I ask bluntly, my voice quiet but steady.

"Of course, why would you think otherwise?" Mom asks, but she looks more panicked than concerned now. She knows that I'm onto them. Good.

"Let me think, oh yeah, it may have something to do with the missing persons websites, the articles under your bed, the fact that I look like that girl who went missing fourteen years ago, on the night her real family was murdered." I spit, unable to contain my emotions any longer.

I see my 'Dad' eye the large butcher knife on the counter to his left, but I already have the pistol out of my jeans, and I raise it so that it points in his direction. "Don't even think about it." I say, my eyes narrowed at the people in front of me, pretending for all these years to be my parents. How fucked up is that?

"You caught us," he admits, his eyes hardening almost instantly. "What a clever girl. It's a shame you won't be around to tell anyone." He reaches out for the knife and grabs ahold of it, and then begins to walk around the island counter to where I stand, the hand in which my gun is situated, shaking madly. This isn't going to end well.

"Fuck you, asshole." I say loudly, before pulling the trigger. As I had wanted it to, the bullet lodges itself into his shoulder, causing him to drop the knife. So I kick it away to the other side of the room and make a break for the front door, my heart pounding in my ears.

I fling open the heavy front door and sprint down the front path, but I hear her behind me, screaming my name, so I make a quick left to the Eaton's driveway, but there is no car. I hear footsteps behind me, so I jump up onto one of the wheelie trash cans beside their gate to the backyard, and jump over it, landing in a crouching position on the other side.

I hear her trying to push the bins out of the way, but I'm guessing she gave up or is trying to find another way into their backyard because the noise stops and I hear running footsteps that seem to go back to the house. Tears start to stain my cheeks as I sneak around the back of the house, and press my back against the glass sliding door, praying that she doesn't find a way in here - I'm not sure I can fight her off, and if she has that knife... I'm not trained with a gun and I could easily miss. It's too risky.

"Who the fuck is that in my backyard?" I freeze at the sound of a voice, and I see the backdoor open, and a flashlight beam focus on me. "Tris, is that you? What are you doing?"

Four.

I run towards him and pull him back inside of his house, and yell at him to lock all the doors and windows. Doing as he's told, he looks at me like I've gone crazy.

"Tris, what is going on?" He asks me aggressively, obviously irritated that I'm in hiding out in his backyard, and now I'm ordering him around like this.

"My parents.. knife... gun- I can't, they.." I stammer, sweat beginning to mix with the silent tears that escape my eyes.

"Woah, slow down. It's okay, you're safe here. Just tell me what happened." Four says, his voice now beginning to soften, and now he just seems panicked.

"My parents aren't really my parents, okay, it's a long story, but they've flipped out and she's after me with a knife and I shot my so-called Dad, and I need to get out of here. Fast! You need to help me!" I say, now able to get out proper words, but it's hard to keep my voice steady.

He takes my wrist in his hand and pulls me out of his kitchen and up the staircase, and then into his room. Faster than the speed of light, he pulls out a duffel bag from his closet and starts stuffing clothes and stuff inside, hurriedly. "Shall I call then police?" He asks as he packs.

"There's no time! I have to get out of here now, but they're waiting for me out there I don't know how I'm going to get away- wait, what are you doing?" I finally start to really notice what he is packing. Clothes and necessities, like the stuff I have in my own backpack.

He grabs a gun out from his nightstand and holds it so tightly that his knuckles turn white. Either he doesn't notice or he doesn't care.

"What, you think I'm going to let you go alone?" He asks, harshly. "We'll get out of here together. You can't do this on your own, and I won't let you. If they have a knife, they could have gotten more in the time that you were in here."

"But what about your Dad?" I exclaim, appalled that he's even considering tagging along.

"He won't even notice I've gone, I need to get out of this shithole just as much as you do." He says, tossing his duffle bag over his shoulder.

"Four, I can't let you-"

"Tris," he says sternly, putting his hands on my shoulders and shaking me a little. "I'm coming with you."

-oo0oo-

Authors Note:

Ah! A new story for you guys! I'm so sorry for my account conduction lately, but I'm very happy with this storyline, so I hope you readers have high hopes for it too!

The more reviews I get on my chapters, the faster I will update! So if you want to see more then please leave a review and let me know what you think of this first chapter.

Also, my chapters will be a lot longer than this, but since this is sort of like the introduction/prologue I wanted to keep it shorter! :)

-GuiltyMind