Chapter 6

Gowland, in his bright yellow suit, was walking around the Amusement Park, making sure that everything was going smoothly and trying to think up additional rides. He was thinking of something to do with mushrooms, when he saw Boris walking through the front gates. Actually, it was more like dragging his feet than it was walking. It wasn't just that though. Boris's head was hung low, slouching over, different from his upbeat posture and his casual strolling. The owner then became aware of the fact that six time zones had passed, but had not seen hair nor hide of Alice and Boris, and here was the cat coming in without the girl. He called Boris over.

The pink haired youth stopped in his tracks, and considered walking in the opposite direction. He shook his head, and trudged towards the red haired man. For once, Boris actually listened to the Amusement Park owner, and this surprised him. The boy stood still in front of him, with his head facing the ground, and his ears laid flat against his head.

Gowland raised his eyebrows and asked Boris, "What happened?" and looking around, asked, "Where's Alice? Did you lose her?"

Boris flinched. "What? You lost her? How is this possible? And for six timezones too!" Gowland exclaimed. He sighed, saying, "Alice will be fine though, she probably just is at one of the other territories. She'll be alright on her own."

The cat murmured something he couldn't hear. "What's that, cat got your tongue?" Gowland teased the boy. He mumbled just a little louder but still too quiet. "Jealous of the other Roleholders? Come on kitty, tell me." Boris's head snapped and stared up defiantly at Gowland, with his red tinted eyes.

"She left Wonderland, and it turns out that Alice isn't even her name!" The man blinked.

"Isn't even her name? What do you mean? That's what she introduced herself as. And left so abruptly! It's not true! I was going to ask her to help me with one of the new attractions."

"Yeah it is. She told me herself, right before she left running. She said all these sorts of thing..." Boris trailed off.

"What things?" Gowland asked, saddened by her disappearance. He would've been pleased if she had at least said goodbye before she returned home. Then it occurred to him.

"Huh? Why was she running?" he asked the freeloader.

Boris shifted his gaze off to the side and tonelessly said, "Well, she kind of yelled at me that everything wasn't real, because it was all just a game. But not the game that Wonderland plays. It's something like a video game, so someone can control the foreigner. And Wonderland doesn't really exist because everything is fiction, and not a dream. And she said her name wasn't Alice. But she took off running and I couldn't catch up to her." And she said she didn't love me. She said she hated me, he silently added.

After she left him, he wandered to the forest. He lost track of time and numbly walked about, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, hoping that she would pop out behind a tree and say 'Just kidding!' But she couldn't be that cruel. She couldn't have made things up like that out of nowhere. She couldn't- Boris stopped himself. The Alice he knew didn't exist. All that exist was the girl that stood in front of him, screaming that he didn't exist, and that she hated him. She was right; he didn't know who she was.

He recalled part of the last six timezones.

~.

"Alice! Alice! I- I mean, person who isn't Alice! Where are you?" Boris yelled through the forest, searching for the girl. No answer.

"Don't just run off! Who knows what you'll run into?" Still nothing.

After he had shaken himself out of the daze, he had quickly took off for the direction she escaped, worried that she might get hurt in her condition. He didn't know what happened, or why she was claiming all these different things, but he wanted to make sure she was safe. He sniffed the air, trying to catch her scent. At first, he caught the faint smell, but eventually it ended up disappearing.

Sure, he was mad as hell at first, stomping through the leaf scattered ground, thinking of all the ways to make her feel bad, but as he thought about it, he started to believe that what she said was true. At least parts of it. He couldn't accept the whole truth now.

He sat on a nearby log, rubbing his neck. "Arggh! Why?" He couldn't understand it. He knew there was more to know, but now that she was gone, he couldn't ask her. He tried massaging his temples, trying to calm himself down. Everything had been going fine now. Joker had backed off of Alice, she finally moved in with him, and he no longer needed to have the handcuffs on her.

Wait...

What?

Since when had he had handcuffed her? Since she tried to leave the first time, a little voice whispered to him.

The first time?

His memories started to flood back into him. He remembered how he kissed her on the steps of her room. He remembered how he tried to stop her from leaving Wonderland. How he handcuffed her when so she wouldn't leave him. When they were in the Country of Hearts.

Another batch of memories entered. How he was jealous of the man at the inn she worked at, and her cat Dinah. He remembered showing her the forest of glowing mushrooms. And kissing her in that forest. That was in the Country of Clovers.

And the last place was the Country of Jokers.

He felt himself slip off the log onto the ground. Sh- she wasn't kidding, he realized. It might just be really a game.

~.

"We're not real? And Alice left. But she wasn't Alice. So Alice didn't leave. Just the girl left," Gowland confusedly tried to put the pieces together, when he heard an all too familiar voice behind him.

"The young lady has left us? The young lady whose name isn't Alice," Blood Dupre commented. The owner glared at the mafia boss. He went on.

"How truly devastating. I was going to ask her to come to the mansion for tea after I negotiated land with Mary." Gowland glared at the mafia boss through his glasses.

"Shut up, Blood. I'm busy. Go away before murder you," Gowland said, grinding his teeth.

"Right, Mary. How are you going to do that, Mary? Will you strap me onto a merry go-round, Mary? How unfortunate, Mary." The amusement park owner started to take out his violin, angered by the mafioso's words, and changed it into his rifle.

A gunfight ensued, and after 20 minutes of Gowland ranting about how he will make sure Blood will find his place at the bottom of the ocean, Elliot paused and exclaimed, "Blood! What are we doing? Alice left!"

"Aww, the lady's left? We wanted to play with her!" whined one of two boys who joined the group, twirling his ax after causing some casualties with his 'playmates'.

"We didn't get a chance to show her our new treasure!" said the other who appeared next to his brother and was decked out in a blue uniform.

"Yes, please excuse me," the handsome Hatter said, putting his hand to his chest. "What happened to the young miss?"

The next morning, Anjelica walked through the gigantic archway that encompassed both the administration office and the cafeteria. It was at least seventy feet tall and thirty feet wide, donated by a nearby wealthy construction company owner. He ordered it to be made of steel, so now whenever anybody looked right at the sun through the archway, it looked like the sun had a halo around it because of the shine it gave off.

Everyone she passed by either stood and stared at her or started whispering to their friends as soon as they saw her. The small girl made her way through the courtyard to meet her friends at their usual spot. Upon seeing their oblivious friend, they all congregated towards her. She eyed the people surrounding her, merely saying hi.

"Annie, are you alright? We heard you were going to the hospital, but we didn't know if anything was wrong, after, well, you know, you fainted," asked a brunette.

"I'm fine," Anjelica replied. "But I didn't have a full check up. There was an emergency that called my doctor away, so I only had time for an hearing and sight test." She shrugged. "There were very few doctors left at the hospital. Apparently a lot of them were in a good mood and left because there weren't many patients at the time. She couldn't schedule me until another month. It's alright though. She asked me if I was experiencing any symptoms that I needed to get checked right away. I told her no," she said, quickly falling silent.

There was a moment of awkward silence before everyone started talking again, avoiding talk of the "incident" as they decided to call it. But their friend didn't participate in any conversation unless someone directly asked her a question. They decided to give the girl her space, even though she couldn't remember a single thing. They wanted to respect her lost memories It was the same throughout the day. People would be careful about asking her questions and stop whispering as soon as she entered the room. Everyone watched her anxiously throughout the day, whether she was writing down notes for science, walking through halls, or even opening a door.

While her friends still acted normal, talking about how cruel their history test was, Anjelica had been staring at the sky, finished with her lunch. Noticing that she was spacing out, a blond friend smiled. It was the usual Anjelica, always daydreaming and being the space case that she was. She waved her hand in front of the girl. Anjelica blinked slowly and turned to her friend. The blond grinned and asked what she was daydreaming about, half-wishing it was about Wonderland.

Anjelica shrugged, saying "Nothing."

"Nothing? You're always thinking about something," her friend teased her.

"No, really, I wasn't thinking about anything," the raven-haired teen insisted with a straight face.

The blond only giggled. "Fine, whatever, keep it to yourself. So, what did you think of the history test?"

Anjelica answered and became silent once more. If anything, people would have thought that she was thinking back to her days in Wonderland. But they knew it couldn't be true, because they knew that she lost all memories of that place. But some were wondering if 'maybe she's just pretending not to remember.' If so, the girl was the best actress they had ever seen.

After school, her friends invited her to go out to eat, but she said she couldn't, that she had too much homework to do, and went home. Once she was done around midnight, Anjelica felt her eyes were slipping, and fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. However, the impact of her body shift her mattress just enough so that a book with purple swirls on the cover between the mattress and her night table tumbled onto the ground. It laid open on the first page, reading:

Day 1

Well, here's another diary/ journal thing. I gotta say, it was just too cute to resist. Besides, I can't find my other journals, so I might as well get a new one, right? So, my name is Anjelica Wrydell. I'm 17, and I'm in my second to last year of high school. Even though I'm actually one of the oldest of my friends, I look younger. It doesn't help that I'm shorter than everyone. People still think I'm 12. It's funny, everyone treats me the age I look. Like I'm the child. They always compare me to puppies & bunnies. They even pinch my cheeks. I guess I play it up a bit too much though, acting childish. But I like smiling and having people laugh. It makes everything better.

OMG! I found this really cool book at the bookstore. Technically, it's a manga. I guess it's like a book with pictures, but with really awesome graphics. Would saying it's Japanese help? Haha, look at me talking to a journal. Okay, writing in the journal. Like you're gonna talk back to me. Hahaha... yeah.

Anyways, the manga. Really cool. Called Alice in the Country of Hearts. I was looking for Through the Looking Glass, but somehow I found this instead. It's really cool. Alice is older, about my age I think, and she gets kidnapped by a rabbit guy named Peter White and brings her down a rabbit hole to Wonderland. And wow. Wonderland is full of guns and blood, but especially guys! It's too bad they're 2D. Right now, Ace is my favorite. I mean, come on, a knight who gets lost? Classic! He's pretty cute for being in black and white too. But I've only read the first volume. Hopefully I'll get the others.

Anyway, I guess I should be honest why I really started writing in this journal. Besides losing the others. I think it's because I've been feeling down for a while now. I don't really know why. It just comes and goes randomly. Usually I'm able to ignore it. I just start thinking about sad things, which makes me sad. But it gets overwhelming at times. Oh well, it's probably just a phase, right?

Oops, I gotta go. It smells like my mom just baked some cookies! Yum.

Several days passed and things started to go back to normal. There was the usual traffic jams, the usual rowdy crowds at school, the usual explosions in the science building by curious teenage boys. Whispering went around the halls about a certain girl's misfortune, but it had simmered down. But no one could ignore it fully. They couldn't erase their own memories.

Thanks for reading! That journal will help explain a lot about Anjelica. It's going to be updated each time she appears in the story, just to let you know. Like it? Hate it? Indifferent? Want a cupcake?

Uh huh, I thought so. Bit OOC here. But get ready for a whole chapter of the Wonderland residents!