PART 13: IN THE BEGINNING AGAIN

~5~

"Kita."
No reply. A dead, blank stare. Cloe started to shiver.
"Kita,"she said again, shaking her slightly. Kita let her head fall back a little, closed her eyes. Like she just fell asleep.
"Open your eyes."
"Leave me alone,"Kita said, without even looking at the other girl.
"I was worried about you,"Cloe said.
"Worried? Worried about what? That I might die of fear and agony? Worried that I might be thinking about my own death, which'll probably take place soon, the whole time?"Kita asked her, still keeping her eyes closed.
"You're scaring me,"Cloe said tearful.
Kita finally opened her eyes and discovered the girl's silhouette in the dark of the night. "Oh, you should be scared. You can crawl away in corners of the room whenever he comes for me, that's the way things are now. You're just a captive to him now, but soon he'll start to show real interest in you too. Then you'll be his most important pet. Maybe after he killed me. Then he'll enjoy himself with you, and then kill you-"
"Stop it!"Cloe screamed, and covered her ears with her hands. She bursted into hysterical sobbing, but Kita was too far gone to feel pity or symphaty.
"You shouldn't do that, you know. Screaming. He doesn't like screaming,"she said and turned onto her side, hoping to get some sleep. Her hope would be in vain ofcourse. She had been trying to fall asleep for half the night; didn't work. If the pain didn't keep her awake, her fear or horrible memories did. When she closed her eyes, she saw his, ice-coloured, burning into her soul.
She nearly wished for death. Couldn't be worse than this torture, right? But maybe she was already dead. Yeah, maybe she died that night in front of the hospital. When she felt a sharp jolt of pain go through her head like a lightningbolt. Maybe it had been a cerebral haemorrhage. Could be. Maybe it had been just that, or a seizure, and she had dropped dead at that very spot.
And the tribe had discovered her cold corpse in the early morning, but she didn't notice that, ofcourse. Kita believed in ghosts. She didn't consider that a childish believe, she truly believed in ghosts of all sorts, and voodoo. And she had heard that not all ghosts realize they're dead.
Maybe she was dead now. Maybe she had died and her soul had been dragged off to hell, where she had to suffer for eternity. She thought that death might give her sweet release, but maybe that would never happen, maybe she was already dead. Maybe she would just have to endure this for the rest of eternity…
Kita screamed and hugged her body.
Cloe jumped up right away. "Kita, what's wrong?"she asked. She kneeled down next to the other girl, but got pushed away. As sudden as Kita had started screaming, she calmed down again.
Cloe shivered again and felt a muscle near her eye twitch involuntarily. She decided to just crawl back into her corner again and try to get some sleep. She was worrying about Kita. The older girl was the only company she had here. Kita had been clear when she first met her, but now it looked like she was going crazy. Cloe curled up, hugged her legs and hoped the other Mallrats would find her soon.
"Mom… I want my mom…,"Kita whispered into the dark. She could almost feel her mother's soft, warm hand holding her own. "Mommy." A gentle humming and another hand, just as soft and with the same warm fragrance, wiping away her tears.
"Mom…"

*

Lebanon. The pearl of the Middle-East. The capital of the Arabian World. At least it had been before the civil war ruined it. Her mother had told her all about it. After all, she had grown up there.
"Habibti, have I ever told you about the old country?"asked Aischa.
Kita shook her head. Ofcourse she heard, but she wanted to hear it again. She could never get enough of it. The woman with the beautiful sand-coloured skin and the black silk hair nodded to her, smiling.
Her mother told her about the sweet fragrance of the warm, rich earth, of the olive-orchards, the little white houses gleaming in the golden sun like diamonds, the perfect blue Mediterranean Sea, the silk her grandfather's women had made.
It used to be so beautiful there. But then things started to change, and she had to leave the country, looking for a better future. That was when she met Kita's father. They married and shortly after that, Kita had been born.
"Ya Helwi. And you were the most beautiful child ever. Your father and the nurses said the exact same thing,"said Aischa, and little Kita, who was already starting to become aware of how pretty she really was, let this compliment run through her mind and add another buildingblock to her confidence.
It wasn't a lie. She was beautiful. And everybody said she was a spitting image of her mother, both in looks as in personality.
Kita never saw how anyone couldn't get along with his or her mother, let alone hate the person that brought you into this world. As for Kita, her mother was her dearest friend, the person she loved the most. They got on with eachother really well, and Kita shared all her secrets with her.
This mostly because she didn't have any real friends to share secrets with. Most girls avoided that girl that was much more beautiful than them (even though they would rather die than admit it), the girl that was a complete mystery, the girl that just seemed to have to look at you to know everything about you. While at the same time, you knew nothing about her.
It had always been like that, even when she was little. She wasn't arrogant, just confident, mysterious, very smart and a bit strange. The other girls avoided her, she had only been invited to the house of one girl in all her life: that of another outcast, called Izabella. But she hardly knew that girl. She just got to know that this Izabella, who preferred to call herself Iz, took great joy in torturing Barbie-dolls.
Amongst all the kids in class, Kita couldn't find an equal. There was no one that fascinated her. No one that even interested her. The other girls, simple and only interested in material things, avoided her and she became a paria.
Later, Kita rather avoided them as well. Strange creatures, they were. She didn't entirely trust them, nearly expected them to go rabid on her and rip her apart. Because everytime she said or did something, they tried to discover the tiniest flaws, enlarge them and bring her down.
They picked on her. The narrowminded, spineless creatures were just waiting for their chance. Kita promised herself never to have any more friends. Their sparkling, snappy remarks to her behaviour sometimes brought her to tears.
Then she came home, red-eyed and her mother asked her: "Habibti, qu'est-ce que c'est?" (They usually talked Arabian or French at home, because both Kita and her mother really disliked the cold English language, even though Kita's father tried to bring them to different thoughts). But Kita couldn't tell that, she didn't want her mother to worry about her.
Her mother should never have to worry. She was Kita's only friend.
Boys, however, Kita soon noticed, were surprisingly tolerant towards all her mistakes. And the older and more beautiful she got, the more they walked around her like drooling dogs.
This made the girls hate Kita even more. They hated her beauty, her dad's wealth, and now she was hogging their potential boyfriends too? The slút.
Kita had as many boyfriends as possible, because she didn't like being alone, or at least: she couldn't stand the hate of others when she was alone. She never understood why they hated her, what had she ever done to them? Ofcourse the boyfriends did help the loneliness, but not so much her reputation.
But the most horrible event in her life came with the diagnosis.
"A braintumor?"her father said shocked, looking at the doctor with his funeral-frown in utter disbelief.
Her mother was the only one that took it pretty well, while she was the sick one.
Kita fell around her neck, refusing to let her go. "Mom, mom, you can't die! You can't, mommy!"she screamed. Her mother tried to soothe her: "Don't cry, little one. Ofcourse I won't die, I just have to stay in the hospital for a few days. Remember, te'berini. Je t'aime, ma petite."
They tried to remove the braintumor. Kita was allowed to visit her mother right after the surgery. Half of her head had been shaven bald, and there was a little door in her skull. It looked horrible. Kita just wanted to leave as soon as possible; she couldn't stand seeing her mother like this.
But it was just about to get worse.
They had tried to, but the doctors couldn't remove the roots of the tumor. This made Kita imagine a dangerous, dark plant in her mother's head, that kept growing when you cut the top of, pushing its thorns into her brains, destroying it. They tried chemo-therapy, but it didn't work. The plant liked its new home, and intented to stay until it had used up all its resources.
At first Kita merely felt sorry for her mother. Aischa couldn't keep her attention to things she read in magazines, she had headaches the whole time, and her vision started to become worse. Kita knew her mother was dying. She expected it to be horrible, but she didn't expect it to be this horrible.
Aischa's whole behaviour started to change. First came the little lies she started to tell, and the unlikely stories she seemed to believe herself. Then the whining came. And in the end she started to seem like a vicious, evil child. She was telling lies about everybody, using swearwords (something Kita had never heard her mother do), she started to forget certain things and certain people. And the people she didn't remember, certainly weren't allowed near her, or else she would have a tantrum. She had a lot of tantrums.
She became more and more of a child. Screaming when she didn't get her way, throwing something to the ground when things didn't go the way she wanted them to go, cursing at people that loved her, wetting her bed. She became a true monster, and to her utter disgust Kita noticed she started to hate her own mother.
Aischa lost all her hair. Her hair had been her pride, the beautiful ocean of dark silk, and Kita's father bought a wig for her. This made it even more painful for Kita to look at her mother, but also more scary. Because when she wore the wig, you couldn't really tell she was sick anymore. You would nearly think she had been like this the whole time: a bloated, evil fairyprincess.
In the end, the lying and the swearing stopped. She didn't talk anymore and had gone nearly completely blind. Then one morning the nurse discovered she had been released from her misery. And Kita never had a proper chance to say goodbye to her. The last time she talked to her real mother, was right before the surgery, when her mother had said she loved her. Fear and sadness had suffocated Kita's voice, and she hadn't been able to say anything back.
After the funeral, Kita needed someone. Anyone. So she started to become close with her father. They had the house to themselves now (except for the fact that there were a few servants to) and they shared their misery. Kita made another friend. She didn't realize she could lose this one just as easily.
The virus came. Kita had been to summercamp when that happened. Summercamp, of all places. One day the kids were all called home, because an urgent message had reached the summercamp: a deadly virus had broken out. Kita was brought home by a parent of one of the children, only to find out that her dad had gotten infected with the virus and died right before her arrival. Again, no chance to say goodbye.
Kita walked out of the house, completely dazed, moving around like she was drunk. It couldn't have happened. Couldn't have. She couldn't have lost her father as well… "No!"Kita muttered and her tearful, suffocated voice reminded her of the moments before her mother's surgery. She vowed to herself: never to let anyone get close to her again.
She was picked up by an independent, strong girl, that didn't seem to care about the death the virus caused and obviously knew where she was going. Kita recognized this girl after some effort: Iz. The Iz that liked to torture Barbies, the girl that had invited her over to her house, a long time ago.
Kita packed her most precious belongings (a big part of that was her golden jewelry) and tagged along with this girl, who had the idea that they would be safe in the woods. Iz seemed nice. Not like one of the girls Kita used to share a classroom with. A person you could become friends with. But she remembered her vow and kept her distance. She remembered her father and mother.

*


"Mom,"Kita muttered. "I want you back. Please, come back!"