Chapter One: Still I Rise
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
-Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise"
The story was spelled out on the yellowed page, headlined by eight stark black letters:
SAM EVANS.
Sex: male; race: white; height: 3'2"; weight: 30 lbs.; hair colour: blond; eye colour: hazel.
He was a little taller at seventeen years, and a little heavier, but Sam was just as incomplete in living colour as he was on the ancient page.
Sam glanced at the clock. It was dangerously close to his group home's ten o'clock lights-out, and he had barely begun. He grimaced, cracked his knuckles, and turned to another page in his file.
Sam knew this story all too well – abandoned on the steps of an orphanage at three years old, branded undesirable and high-risk. Piles of forms spelled out his circumstances in tragic black and white. Mother: deceased; father, unknown. When he was four years old, one of his social workers had given him the whole sordid tale as thought it were a Disney movie.
"Once upon a time," she'd cooed, "there was a man and there was a woman, and they made a baby. And they loved the baby very much, and they knew it was important to take care of the baby, but they couldn't take care of him at that time in their lives."
The social worker had left out the part where the king ran away and the queen died of heartbreak and heroin. That was the X-rated version, the stuff left on Disney's cutting-room floor. But Sam knew the rest of the story. He had lived the tragic tale of their little prince, left to fend for himself in dirty diapers and crowded children's homes.
He didn't know what he was after, exactly, by digging out his file and highlighting anything that jumped out at him. His was a whitewashed story, a history full of holes. Perhaps he was just trying to fill it in, trying to find something that he could point to, something that screamed this is who Sam Evans is.
Sam took one final look at the clock – five minutes to lights-out. This was it – this was his year. Tomorrow morning, he would pull on his old faded blue jeans and march into the foreign halls of William McKinley High School. He would listen to everybody whispering "Who's that kid?" and "Do you know who he is?"
And maybe, just maybe, he would finally be able to answer those questions himself. This year, he was going to write his own story.
One quiet afternoon, as she was dusting the broken dresser in the little-used guestroom, Quinn discovered the photograph that changed everything.
The tiny square folded and tucked into the space between the dresser and the wall beckoned to her. She reached for it, her fingers running over a thin layer of dust as she pried the paper loose and held it, just held it, for a moment.
She unfolded the photograph, blowing the thin, dusty sheen off of its well-worn face. Four deep lines, the result of years pressed against the wall, scored the picture into sections. Quinn recognized herself in the picture, around two years old, unmistakably blonde, clad in a turquoise bathing suit and giggling cheerfully as she dumped a bucket of sand onto...
She squinted, unable to see clearly in the dim light that filtered in through the guestroom's murky windows. Charlotte, maybe? Quinn furrowed her forehead, deep in though. No, Charlotte was much older than Quinn; besides, the other child looked like a boy. A billowing cloud of sand obscured the other child's face, so it was difficult to tell for certain, but Quinn could have sworn she saw a strip of white-blond hair, like duckfluff, poking out from behind Quinn's pink plastic bucket. His hands flailed in the air; Quinn smiled slightly as she noticed one of his hands curled up into a fist, likely grasping a handful of sand to fling at her.
Quinn perched herself on the bed, letting her fingers run over the deep folds of the photograph. Her eyes flitted around the photograph, as she searched for details, any clue as to who this boy was. Red swimming shorts, sunburnt-pink arms and legs. She had seen him before. She recognized him. She felt like she knew him.
"Who are you?" she whispered into the quiet. "Who are you?"