There is a small, skinny girl hiding at the edge of the schoolyard. She is sitting curled-up behind a bush, her long white-blond hair hiding her face from the world. She has just turned eleven, and in a month, her life is about to change. But she doesn't know that. All that she knows is that if Jonathan gets his hands on her, her life is worth about as much as a fart in a hurricane.
Look at her. Her already angled bone-structure is enhanced by the fact that there isn't a spare ounce of meat together on her, something that brings ones thoughts to a dried-out corpse. And her eyes contain about as much hope as if she was one. She has pale-blue eyes, that look white today, when the sullen lead-grey sky makes the air itself look murky. She is not very pretty, bony and pale, and the dark circles under her eyes that signal lack of sleep are not helping up the picture. On the other hand, can she be blamed for them?
IT happened last night, after all. Again. IT always happens again. And again and again and again, until she cannot – CANNOT – sleep at night, not any more than she can go near the shower.
The white hands clasp around her ankles, bared by the all-too-short (at least for an eleven-year-old) skirt that her father bought her. But she doesn't want to think about that.
She likes her hands. They are slim and white and lithe, and they don't look as freakish as the rest of her. They're nice. They're the hands of someone who plays some kind of instrument, even though she was never allowed to learn. Or maybe, they are the hands of a magician. Someone who fools the eyes with trickeries and movements faster than light. She thinks she would like that.
It would almost be like being invisible.
This small, pathetic girl would give anything to be able to become invisible. Anything. Even the meagre scraps that is all there is left of her soul.
To be invisible, or to fly. Hopeless wishes, her last resorts, dreams that will never come true. A swallow cuts the sky in half with its swift flight, and she bites her teeth together. Wings, feathers, eyes that see further than this damnable world, this miserable excuse of a life… The despairing dream of the impossible.
It happens all the time, if you just look carefully. Children without hope, children who have given up, children who let themselves be filled with cold, bitter cynicism, children who aren't children anymore. It's a way of growing up, only faster and much more brutal. A large percentage of them break in the process. The others come out hard, cold, refined as steel and just as unbreakable, all of them wishing more than anything that they weren't like that. That they were softer. Normal.
Either the bird gets out of the cage, or dies trying. But if it does get out, it finds out too late that its wings has been clipped. It will have to find wings of its own, or perish.
The school-bell chimes, she has made it for now. She stands up, brushing the dirt off her clothes, wondering how long this will go on. How long she will have to hide. Hiding does not go well with a proud creature such as she. Her pride is bent and scratched and rusty, but it's there, and it's sharp. And her life is diminishing her more and more, until she finally will be nothing else than this pride, and the fading memories of her impossible dreams.
And that is when she will break.
God, how frightened she is.
She reaches the gate, after the rest of the students have already entered, and runs up the stair so she won't have to be late. She manages to get in before the teacher closes the door. The teacher is a faceless creature with a voice like a drunken slur and a mind like cotton. Or that is at least how it seems to the girl.
Her bullies are also strange. One of them is all muscles, all strong arms for holding her back, holding her down. One of them is all mouth, all a big grin to mock her when she is bleeding. One of them is all body, all reminders of that she is abnormal. And one of them is all eyes, big beautiful eyes frames by make-up, always watching, always judging. That is the most dangerous one.
As for the others… well, they are all necks, all backs turned against her, most of them. But some of them are all halos. They try to save her. They try to save her by making her even smaller, by making her dependant. She hates them, but all the same wishes that they would for once not stand in her way when she is lying down, but throw themselves down on the ground beside her.
She wants that so much that it almost makes her cry.
The night before last – she was sleeping at her mother's place then – she dreamt about eyes. Eyes that looked upon her like she mattered. Where her eyes are almost white, these had been the darkest, deepest black, and it had been like finding her way back to a time when home was home, not hell.
She had also dreamt of a lake, and a tree, and the feeling of other people walking beside her, laughing and talking. She had caught a glint of hair, black and brown and blond and red, gleaming in the sun. She had liked that dream.
She had dreamt of being special, she had dreamt of people laughing with her, not at her. And she had woken to reality.
That had made her cry, even if the tears were hastily dried away, and she bit her pillow to stifle the sobs. There has to be discipline, lest there be chaos. Chaos is painful, for chaos feels and acts where discipline thinks and analyses. Avoid chaos at any cost.
Avoid losing control.
On her way home, she throws grass into the air, and watches it drift towards earth. For a short time, a straw can get to fly, even if it can never hope to stay in the air for long. Maybe she should throw herself away, just to feel for a short moment how it is to fly…
The scars on her wrists sting when she stretches her spidery hands towards the sky; They are a warning. You cannot hold on to thin air, they say. When you are gone, there is no coming back.
Problem is, she likes that thought.
The sun shines now, fighting its way through the blanket of passive clouds. It does not inspire hope in her, only hints at that there is going to be a change in the weather. The weather is a big thing, yet it can change in a blink of an eye. Maybe, then, even larger things can change. Like lives.
That is not hope. It's the beginning of a fight.
A fight to stay in the air, not to drift to the ground, no matter what physics say. A fight for the right to exist as an exception. And she is going to take the chance, when given to her. A straw of grass cannot turn into a bird if you just go around wishing and hoping. You have to act, or you will be gone.
And stay gone.