3: Rebellion

I don't think I was ever a "normal" girl. If I was, then I don't remember it. At school, around town, with my parents, and on the TV (when I disobeyed and watched it), I gathered some facts about people that seemed strange to me. Normal people are able to empathize with other people, even unrelated people, to extraordinary degrees. Killers are rare because the human instinct of empathy prevents the average person from being able to simply kill another person. Soldiers, who sometimes kill others in duty, sometimes have issues with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, and remorse. Normal people also fear the law and jail to an extreme degree, keeping them in line. I also heard people talk about honor and values that make it "wrong" to break laws.

Remorse, physical empathy, emotional attachment, fear of punishment, and respect for a code of honor… these are feelings that don't often come naturally to me. I had always felt that if I had to kill a person, I would be able to, and it wouldn't destroy me emotionally. It's not that I entertained thoughts of killing people, though. Well, not at that point. A set of values sounds restricting, and I don't understand why people become so obsessed with theirs. It's not that I had no values—I mean, I had things I did and didn't want to do, and risks I did or didn't want to take—but I felt that adjusting those values over time could be the only rational course of action.

I was certainly capable of feeling remorse, but not to the same degree that I think others do. Starting around age ten, boys would sometimes come to talk to me and ask to be my special friend. At age eleven I started getting love letters. I rejected all those boys in the cruelest ways I could think of, and I rarely felt bad about it. I only felt remorse over things when my mother called me a failure or a bad daughter or when she cried about how terrible she thought I was. (She didn't know a thing about the boys, by the way. I kept it to myself. Her criticisms were over petty things like chores, grades, and incorrect speech.)

Fear in general had little hold over me—except, again, the fear of disappointing my mother. I felt that fearing authority in a more general sense was unproductive. If people are so afraid of jail, then they should just be smarter and hide their crimes better. I've always thought that way. There are laws about animal cruelty too, but they didn't stop me from throwing large rocks and other harmful objects at cats in the alleys on my way from school.

I once killed a cat using a pocket knife I stole from a boy who I rejected. (Again, I had no remorse over the theft.) I did it because I had read about hunters out in the country. I found I liked the idea of hunting very much. However, I did feel quite guilty after killing the cat. So I decided it was senseless to hunt and kill things that posed no threat or competition to me.

After that I didn't kill any more cats. I did enjoy finding them dead, however, along with run-over dogs and the occasional fox or tanuki. I studied their bodies in great detail and was never bothered by the blood, gore, or bones. I didn't feel particularly sad. The lives of those animals simply seemed to have no relevance to my own life.

All this makes me sound like a cold-hearted person, but I didn't feel cold in the sense of not having emotions. On the contrary, I felt very strong emotions every day. I hated myself for not being good enough for my parents. I even cut myself a few times where nobody would notice. A part of me felt rage at my mother and father, and at the school system, but I always did my best to hide it. I frequently felt afraid—not of authority in general, but afraid that my mother might stop caring for me, throw me out on the street, or lock me away until I starved. I was terrified of tight spaces. I wondered worriedly about my future. Would things always be this miserable?

Thinking that way made me feel so depressed and frustrated that I didn't know what to do. So I lashed out at the world by hurting the cats, massacring insects, destroying flowers I didn't like, and heartlessly rejecting all boys who approached me. Sometimes I even bragged about my grades and made fun of other girls who didn't do well in school. This lashing out, however, could be reined in at any time. I could control it. That's another thing that separated me from others around me. I could hide my true emotions and fake a smile. I was known to most of the middle school as a polite, charming, intelligent, and obedient girl. I am a great actress.

I believe a more normal mother would have found out about the unusual or cruel things I had done and punished me for them. But my mother never cared enough to notice and see past my acting. She reprimanded me instead for things that were not worthy of such emotional punishment. The tallies continued. The time in the closet continued. The emotional manipulation and the neglect continued. Then, around when I turned thirteen, I graduated from "The Closet." What came next was even worse, however.

My mother was gone all day one day. That meant I woke up to an empty house. I found myself surprisingly disoriented and unsure of what to do. Part of me wanted to use this chance to run away and never come back. But mom was surely somewhere in the city, and all it would take to bring her back would be one call from one of the teachers at school reporting me absent. That's the level of insane control my mother held over my life. At last I decided to go to school. However, I wasn't about to spend the day normally. I called home using the school phone and nobody was there. I suspected mom would not return until late.

I decided to do something daring. That day, at the end of school, a boy asked to talk to me alone. He skipped the antiquated and frankly annoying love letter and simply asked if I wanted to be is girlfriend. He said he liked me. I think his name was Aizawa-kun. I told him I would go on a date with him the next day (Saturday) if he agreed to help me sneak onto the roof and hang out there with me. I also attached the condition that he had to buy me a can of good juice and let me see the action manga he was had in his bag. Usually, I had to go straight home after school, no exceptions. So this, to me, would be a day of complete freedom and breaking rules. Aizawa accepted.

As the sun set and things got dusky, I felt quite pleased with myself. I was never allowed to have canned juice drinks at home; I was only allowed to have one glass of pulpy, low-sugar orange juice with breakfast. The sugar gave me quite a buzz. I read the action shounen manga volume all the way through and I had found it full of surprising amounts of violence and blood. I enjoyed it. None of the teachers found me or Aizawa on the roof because Aizawa had actually stolen a spare key and everyone else had gone home.

With all that accomplished, I decided it was best to get back home. On the way out of the school, I told Aizawa that he was a bore and I would not go on a date with him. It was just as well, since my mother would never let me anyway. If I wasn't going to be spending time with him, I figured, I would just break up as cruelly as possible. In reality Aizawa wasn't boring, but that's what I told him. Oh, and I kept the manga—stole it—on purpose. Aizawa-kun never spoke to me after that. Again, it was just as well, since I wouldn't have been allowed to even be friends with him after today.

To my absolute horror, my mother was at home by the time I returned. It was dark already. Two or three times in the past, my mother had suddenly disappeared, but in those cases, she was gone three to five days at time and dad once told me it was because she was in a psych ward. I didn't know what that meant. Anyway, I wasn't expecting her to return to the house that evening. I wanted to just run away when I saw the car. But I knew I would be found eventually. I went inside, not knowing about the cage that would greet me.