Life Potential.

My name is Sabrina Ann Andrews. My friends call me Sab. I just turned seventeen and my parents finally bought me a car for my birthday. I have a dog named Miffy and a little brother named Stevie and we have a house with a tree in the yard that I like to climb when I want to be alone. And now I'm also a Vampire Slayer. 

No one noticed the change except me. I woke up in the middle of the night and felt so… energized. I felt like I could run for days and days and not get tired. It freaked me out and I couldn't get back to sleep all night. But I still didn't feel like crap in the morning. I felt like I'd slept all night and then some. Weird. And it all happened over night. All of a sudden I had muscle definition that would make any athlete jealous, I could do an ass load of chin-ups in gym, and my reflexes were insanely good. I had always been a total klutz, but now I think I could walk around all day on my hands if I wanted to, and not fall down or knock anyone over.

It was hard not to show off. The only thing that stopped me was they fact that I didn't know how or why this had happened to me. What if people thought I was some kind of mutant and locked me away so that scientists could use me for experiments? No thanks. I like my life just fine, and if that means I hide my new abilities, then that's okay with me.

But then one night after dinner I was fighting with Stevie. He was being a little brat while I was trying to do my homework and I finally snapped and shoved him out of my room and slammed the door. Or, that's what I had meant to do. Instead, Stevie went flying down the hall and my door slammed so hard it broke off of its hinges. Oopsie.

Stevie broke his arm in two places. Mom and Dad were pissed. And worried.

They tiptoed around me from then on. Knowing something weird was going on, but not what it was. My family was afraid of me. I started keeping to myself at school too, I was worried that if someone pissed me off I would snap and hurt them. I didn't want to do that to my friends, have them hate me like that, so I decided to alienate them before they could do it to me.

Months later. I was nobody. I went to school, sat in the back of my classes. Didn't talk, barely ate, was ignored at school and feared at home. I spent a lot of time in my tree during those few months.

Then one day this perky blonde shows up at the door, looking for me. Mom shows her to the tree.

"Hi Sabrina, my name is Buffy Summers." She smiles too much. This is not a place for smiling.

"What do you want? Did the school send you?" My school thinks I'm depressed (which I guess I am) and they've been trying to make me see one of their counselors or maybe a shrink.

"Nope." She shakes her head. Still smiling. "I just wanted to talk to you for a minute. It's pretty important."

"Nothing is important any more." I tell her.

She frowns. Good, I think. She bites her lip as she tries to think of a way to get me down from my tree. Not gonna happen.

Suddenly she's swung herself up into the bottom branches. She climbs lithely to my perch – it's as high as I can get in this tree without the branches breaking from my weight – and settles into a spot near mine. Fantastic, I think.

"Your Mom said you've been acting weird." Buffy scrunches up her nose with what looks like distaste for my mother's choice of words. "That you have been for a few months now."

"So?" I frown. "I'm a teenager; I'm supposed to be weird."

"Are you supposed to be strong enough to slam your door off its hinges?" Buffy retorts.

I answer with a glare. "You forgot 'and break your little brother's arm in two places'."

She is silent for a moment. "I did that once. After it happened to me. I slapped my sister, Dawnie, on the face because she called me a slut. She didn't know what it meant but she knew it was an insult. I dislocated her jaw."

Shit. "Did you get in trouble?"

"Oh yeah. Mom tore me a new one and grounded me for a month. I snuck out anyway."

"My Mom just stopped talking to me. Or coming near me." I tell her. I feel tears well up in my eyes. "She's afraid of me."

"You're afraid of you." Buffy replied. "You don't know what's happened to you or why, and you don't know how to control it. I'm so sorry."

"Sorry?"

"Sabrina—"

"Sab."

"Okay. Sab, I have a story to tell you…"

_+_+_+_+_+_

So. It was Buffy's fault that I was called. A friend of hers did some magical whosit and now every girl in the world who had the potential to be a slayer has been turned into one.

She said I could tell my parents. I don't know if they'll understand it though. I didn't really understand. Buffy said she might know someone who could explain to them for me.

I'm Sab the Vampire Slayer. It's my job to stay up past curfew and kill scary growly monsters, to sacrifice my everything to defend people from the darkness.

I had the potential, so I was chosen.  But was it the only thing I had the potential to be? I mean, had the universe already decided that I was going to be a slayer no matter what? What about my potential to be other things? Like a lawyer or a teacher or a mom or a nun or an astronaut… Now I don't get to know, because I'm a slayer. A slayer forever. Well, until I die. Which, according to Buffy, could be at any time. Slayers don't tend to life real long. 

I don't think I want to be a slayer. I'm scared of the dark. I'm supposed to be a klutz, reflexes of a sloth. And I don't want to die. I want to get married and have babies and life until I'm 100 and then die in my sleep. I don't want my throat to be ripped out by a vampire or to be eaten by a werewolf or sacrificed by a warlock because I have slayer blood now.

Buffy says I have to come with her to their new slayer school in Europe. That they can train me so I can kill the bad guys. What if I don't want to kill the bad guys? Buffy told me I don't have a choice. They'll kill me if I don't kill them first.

Sabrina Andrews is already dead. She died that night when I was called. When my potential was realized. I'm the Slayer now.