Chapter 1
Amy just wanted to be a normal girl. She just wanted to fit in, and be liked. She was intelligent, but nothing special, or showy. She was not even (Dare I say it?) excessively attractive. Plus, she had epilepsy. If that wasn't like being born with a target on her back, she didn't know what was.
She was short, adding to her helpless look. She had thick brown hair that refused to grow any longer than three inches past her shoulders. She was thin, painfully thin. Her only real beauty lay in her eyes, big green eyes, flecked with brown. She had a habit of staring in a way that was very disconcerting when being mocked.
She was basically alone. Her single mother was of course always there for her, but it wasn't quite the same. Plus, she was Amy's mother, which meant a lot of the time, she couldn't be her friend. Sometimes she had to punish her, or something motherly like that.
So Amy was alone, struggling in a world full of nightmares and private demons that she would never dream of sharing with her mother.
She looked outside. It was summer, a beautiful day no less. She stood outside on the lawn, wrapping her arms around herself tightly, and examined her neighborhood.
A pale, pasty kind of prettiness, perfect, candy-coated houses, perfect families, and perfect lawns surrounded Amy. It always amazed her that she was here at all, what's more, living in one of those houses. She had always felt disconnected from it, like a maverick atom swirling randomly in a galaxy of primness and orderliness.
Amy sighed. Before the fourth grade, it had never felt like this. Before her first grand mal epileptic fit . . . hopefully her last. She groaned, remembering the day.
The teacher had been showing a Christmas movie to the children. In one scene, black and white had suddenly started flashing on the screen. That was the last Amy remembered, but the students remembered everything else perfectly. Amy had suddenly launched herself out of her seat, convulsing violently. In one particularly violent spasm, her back arched, and a piercing scream had keened out of her throat.
Nobody would ever forget. At the best of times, only a few students were calling her "Spaz" and pushing her around. At the worst, everybody joined in, even the teachers.
Yes, things were different after that, and not just with other people. It changed her too. Some of her memories from before were just gone. And petit mal seizures, where she simply blacked out for a few seconds, were all too common for her, adding fuel to the teachers' persecution. But most of all, her thinking processes had even seemed to change. Sometimes they seemed speeded up, and at other times impossibly slow. She felt like a computer with a virus.
Sighing, she slowly turned back to the house, but before she reached it, a dark blur caught her eye. She turned around. Someone riding a bike with their collar up and hood down had tossed something on her lawn.
She stepped towards it, squinting to make out what it was. Brown, cylindrical . . . Oh shit!
She started to turn to run, but she was too late. The firecracker went off.
