Hi! So, one review. My first review. And it was honest, which is goodlygoodgoodgood. And, uhm, yeah. You're not supposed to be able to tell about Naomi and Nom and any of the characters yet. With these first two chapters, I'm just trying to create an atmosphere. Sorry, I don't know if you're supposed to do that or not...

So, uhm, yeah. Thanks. This chapter and the first chapter are more like prologues - and you never really get anything out of prologues.

Let's switch focus. Let's forget, for the moment, what the scared little girl with the messy purple hair and big brown eyes can't. Let's forget Roxas Krest and all his little habits that made Nom want to stay with him all the time.

Instead, let's imagine how it would feel to know one thing, one person, our whole lives, only to have them torn away from us – or rather, be torn away from them – and then thrown into some school with tight uniforms and no going home on weekends.

At first it was hard. It was hard to forget about Roxas and it was hard to use up all of the room on a single mattress. Then it was hard to breathe in all day and stick your chest out like you knew who you were and exactly what you were doing.

The first two things Nom's mother brought her was a bottle of dark brown hair dye and some clothes that weren't second hand from the men's section. Nom didn't like material touching the skin of her bloated stomach, or the feeling of having her bare, chubby legs stick out everywhere.

The next thing Nom got brought was a meditation CD and a book about teenage sexuality. So Nom sat in her room and listened to a voice tell her to relax her muscles, while she curled up as tensely as she could and cried.

This sucks, this sucks, this fucking sucks, was all she repeated in her head. She had told Roxas that she was leaving on the Friday, when truth was she wasn't leaving for another week. So she just sat in her room and ducked behind her curtains when Roxas walked past her house sadly.

Why did her mother keep her here? She would much rather just get sent up to wherever she was being taken away to and be done with it. But apparently she needed time to calm down and realise how right this decision was.

"Right, my ass," Nom mumbled as she flicked a strand of her newly dyed dark brown fringe back and forth. She heard the bell go from her middle school and sighed. Destiny Islands Middle School just wasn't hers anymore, so why couldn't she forget it? Her legs were cold, even with the five pairs of stockings and seven pairs of socks. It was spring, damn it! Why was she wearing a stupid black skirt and a pink sweater?

Roxas had taken to talking home the long way after Nom had 'left', always walking extra-slowly past Nom's 'old' and 'abandoned' house, breathing everything old and new in. Every day he took a few steps forward to knock on the door, in hopes that Nom was hiding and then they could run away together, and every day Nom's heart jumped a million miles an hour because maybe he just might.

But he never did, and Nom always tried not to cry and Roxas' world shattered day after day and she sat there was watched, feeling as similar to him as she always had.

Her phone, shoved roughly underneath her cold and unused mattress, had swarms of messages from lots of people, some saying politely they would miss her, others saying the truth. Some were truthful, some were heartfelt, but none were from Roxas.

Nom knew there would be no messages from Roxas and that's why she didn't see the need for her phone anymore. Because Roxas knew that Nom and Nom knew Roxas and inside themselves they had both decided that it would be easier to fight to urge to reply to each other if there was nothing to reply to in the first place.

"Naomi!" called Myra Best, trying her hardest not to end her sentence with, 'You can forget about boarding school and go meet Roxas out the front!' Myra really did know how much this was killing her daughter, but she couldn't bear to tell Nom that the apartment she was supposed to move into wasn't actually being emptied out completely until a week after Mrs and Mr Best had been promised.

So she decided to play the best cop, and not give into anything Nom had to say. She just wanted her daughter to live up to the brains she was born with, and go on with that dream the young Naomi used to babble about all the time, before Roxas and her had found video games and the internet and switched off any logical senses they had.

Naomi Best, who existed a long time before Nom, wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to travel the world and interview victims of horrible crimes like the ones her Dad always yelled about at the TV when the news was on.

Of course, at the age of two, it came out more like, "Mummy, I'm gonna make the sad people happy by letting them know I care on TV," but as Naomi grew up, that sentence became more concrete and easier to understand.

And Myra thought that if she could get Nom to say that sentence, or even remember how Naomi felt, that maybe everything was going to work out for Nom.

But Nom didn't know any of this, any of how Myra Best felt or even how she herself felt. She was somewhere between numb and absolutely writhing in pain, so she just bit her lip and plodded down the hallway to her mother, who was in the bathroom.

"Honey," Myra said. "I remembered that you wanted some extensions a couple of months ago, so I brought you some. I can tell you don't want to look different at your knew school, so I thought you could have these."

Deep down, Nom knew that her mother was trying to be as nice as she could, and so she smiled. It wasn't real or comfortable, and her mother sighed with knowledge and maybe even guilt, before standing up and rubbing her daughter's cheek tenderly.

"You know you are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me," she said softly, pulling her daughter in close. "It will be okay," she whispered into her Nom's naturally curly hair, as it shivered along with the rest of Nom's body. "I promise."

Nom didn't move. She didn't wrap her arm around her mother's body, but she didn't pull away, so they both just relished in the fact that in two days Nom would be gone and settling into a school she had no idea about.

"Mum?" Nom asked a few minutes later, pulling away gently. "Do you, uhm, know how to put in extensions?"

Myra smiled. "Let me show you, hun. Then we can get some very much needed sleep."

And so, after Nom got the hang of clipping in long, brown extensions into the back of her head, she took her mother's hand and closed her eyes as they walked past the front window and into her mother's room. There was a double bed there, and Nom felt warm again as she had someone to snuggle up with for the last time.