1

Amy started her day like any other.

She woke up to her screaming alarm clock at exactly 6:15 a.m. and slammed a finger into the "off" button to make it shut up. She stretched, groaned, yawned, then sat up with a reluctant sigh.

George, the family calico, came into her room and hopped up on her bed as if on cue. He plopped down and rolled over for his routine morning belly rubs. Amy smiled indulgently and reached out for his soft orange fur. "Hey there, buddy," she said the words as if this were an odd occurrence—like he hadn't jumped onto her bed in the morning and purred as loud as a motorcycle for the last three years.

Three years…

Amy shook the thought from her mind as quickly as it had come. She clicked her tongue chidingly and got out of bed. It was going to be a long day, she could sense it, and decided not to bother making her bed. I'll get it later, maybe, she thought, or I'll just fix my blankets before going to bed tonight… I dunno.

She stretched her arms above her head, lacing her fingers together. There was a satisfying crack in her back as she arched it, and she sighed again. She sat down on her floor and extended her legs across the floor in front of her. Her left foot slid to rest against the inside of her right thigh, left knee bent against the carpet. Amy leaned down and gripped her right ankle with both hands, breathing deeply as her muscles stretched. She held the position for two minutes, counting to one-hundred-and-twenty, then switched sides: her left leg out, right bent, hands gripping her left ankle. She counted to one-hundred-and-twenty.

George, as always, jumped down to her after the four-minute stretch, bunting her hands as she pushed herself from the floor.

"Hi, buddy," she said each time he bumped her. "Yes, hello. Good morning."

On her feet, she began her next exercise: simple arm stretches. One arm was lifted and bent back behind her shoulder, fingertips flat between her shoulder blades, the other bent back and up, fingertips flat against her other digits. From behind, this almost made a tilde shape. She held the position for two minutes, then switched the positioning of her arms and held for another two. At the end of the stretch, she bent to touch her toes, holding for the last two minutes of her routine, then picked up the clingy orange calico.

"Hi, buddy-bud," she murmured, scratching behind his ears with one hand as he settled his front paws on her shoulder. "You wanna help me feed the fishes? Hm? You wanna help? Yeah? Let's go."

Amy walked out of her room and hooked a left, coming out of the hall with a quick chirp of "Good morning" to her parents in the kitchen.

"Hey, sweetie," Robert Kramer said, glancing up from his morning paper before going back to the article he was reading.

"Amy, what are you going to want for dinner?" Rosemary Kramer said, tone clipped and tense. Her face was stony and neutral, but even from across the room, Amy could tell something had aggravated her.

Or someone, she thought, glancing curiously at the much newer hallway that opened up just behind the sofa. That was the most likely reason for her mother to be so edgy before going to the city for one of Sara's art shows.

"I'm not sure; I think I'll probably just make some spaghetti." the teen said calmly, forcing her tone to come off as sweet and cheery.

Her mother scoffed and turned back to the pan sizzling on the stove. Amy scowled and glared at her turned back before walking to the next hallway. Her dad sighed and shook his head in her peripheral vision.

Her father was mostly grey now, stress having brought on pre-mature pigment loss over the last three years. The… incident had brought on many changes, one of which was the collection of renovations. The renovations, the entire family had agreed unanimously, were much needed after the first six or seven months with their new addition.

That new addition, and the main cause of her family's stress for the better part of a year, was Dennis, Amy's ventriloquist's dummy. Or, more accurately, Amy's living ventriloquist's dummy. The one that didn't try to enslave her and her entire family, anyway.

Dennis had been more than a little confusing the few years he'd been alive. Amy had frequently witnessed him straighten up randomly and squint at nothing in particular, his jaw moving up and down almost silently as he appeared to mouth something to himself. He would then shake his head with a confused frown and go back to whatever he was doing. There were other instances where he seemed on the verge of recalling a memory—a memory he never seemed to be able to grasp, something that he knew he knew, but he didn't have the slightest clue what it was. He'd remember the names of people he used to know, but when asked about them would always say, "I don't know… I can't remember." with the most melancholy expression Amy had ever seen.

It was difficult for Mr. and Mrs. Kramer because Amy made it her mission to help Dennis remember—remember the girl named Alice, the boy named Daniel Carter and his brother, remember why he was a doll and didn't remember these things in the first place.

Indeed, this non-remembrance made the whole family wary at first, but it was Dennis's living state that kept the Kramers on their toes the most and for the longest amount of time. After all, the first doll to reveal his sentience to them tried to enslave them. However, Amy quickly saw that Dennis meant no harm—she was convinced that he probably couldn't hurt anyone if he tried. This realization allowed her to relax with him, and they became friends.

That's why he had gotten his own room off of the living room—he was a person, as far as the majority of the family was concerned, and deserved his own space with his own things. The Kramers had wanted a few added rooms, anyway, so what was making one into a bedroom?

"Knock-knock," Amy called down the hall to his bedroom. "Den?"

"I'm awake," he called back, a few shuffling steps accompanying his words before the door opened and she could see her friend. "'Morning, Amy."

"Goodmorning," she chirped, bouncing George and accidentally waking him. "Calm down, scaredy-cat," she mumbled, petting his back soothingly. "Wanna feed the fishes?"

"Sure."

With Dennis's bedroom door clicking shut behind them, Amy led the way to the pets' room, an L-shaped area on the other side of the hallway where they had all of their pet supplies: the cat castle made of cardboard, plywood, and various other materials for George and his kitty friends, their cat toys, the cat's food and water dishes, et cetera, but also Amy's fish.

Amy had two tanks, each fifty gallons and well decorated. One had two dwarf lionfish—named Medusa and Hestia—and the other had a school of guppies with two Siamese Algae Eaters (a species of suckerfish). Medusa and Hestia were Amy's babies. She would feed the lions and Dennis would feed the guppies and suckers, just as it always happened when he helped her feed the fish.

The lionfish tank was set against the far end of the wall running left from the doorway, and the guppie tank was directly beside the door. There was a large cabinet of tank cleaning supplies, fish food, and whatnot within, and Amy set George on a bed beside the castle in favor of grabbing her and Dennis the food they needed. Dennis took a bottle of flakes and algae wafers, saluting Amy as had become their ritual when feeding the fish. Amy saluted him back and walked over to feed the lionfish.

The morning was completely and utterly normal—there wasn't a thing out of place anywhere in the house and there wasn't a thing amiss with anyone, so far as any of the Kramers were concerned. However, while Dennis was perfectly content with their routine, with the sense of security that came with knowing (knowing what was going to happen, who he was going to see, et cetera), Amy was struck by a strong longing for something more, something different. Something that wasn't so boring.

Something that would fulfill her in a sense, satisfy her in a way she had only experienced once, three years ago.

2

It was no secret around town what had happened at the Party House all those years ago—or, more accurately, what people thought happened at the Party House three years ago. It was a fairly small town, where you knew most of your peers and those you didn't know knew your friends or family. As such, word traveled quickly from one end of town to the other, and almost every kid in her school knew about what "she" did before the end of seventh grade.

That had been the longest school year of her life. The halls were filled with whispers that distracted her all day. Her grades had suffered immensely. To save her grades, Mr. and Mrs. Kramer pulled her out of public school and started a homeschool regime. Pretty soon, their youngest daughter's grades had improved considerably, so they kept with it through the end of middle school and decided to continue through high school.

"Don't fix what's not broken," Mr. Kramer had told Amy when this decision was made. "You're brilliant and we're glad to finally see how great you can do in school."

Therefore, every school day, she sat down at the kitchen table and worked through the chapters, pages, online activities, and various critical thinking questions her parents had assigned her for the day. Her longest day since middle school ended at 2:37 P.M., and that was with an hour-and-a-half-long lunch break earlier in the day. Her average time was 8-12, while her siblings toiled away until 3-3:30 only to drag out hours of homework later that night.

The only "out-of-class" work she ever had to do was double-ups, make-ups, and projects—essays were especially difficult, but she'd never gotten lower than a B- on one and didn't plan to change that.

Today, however, she'd been plagued with mind-numbingly boring material and a continuously wandering mind. It was 11:42 and she was only through two of her six subjects for the day, and that morning her parents had estimated she'd be done by 1:30, maybe sooner.

In 58 BC, Cleopatra presumably accompanied her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, during his exile to Rome after a revolt in Egypt (a Roman client state) allowing his daughter Berenice IV to claim the throne. Berenice was killed in 55 BC when Ptolemy returned to Egypt with Roman military assistance. When he died in 51 BC, the joint reign of Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII began, but a falling-out between them led to open civil war. After losing the 48 BC Battle of Pharsalus in Greece against his rival Julius Caesar (a Roman dictator and consul) in Caesar's Civil War, the Roman statesman Pompey fled to Egypt.1

Amy slumped over her book dejectedly, groaning into the paper. Who the fuck's idea was it for her to take world history, anyway?

Oh, right… It was hers.

Brilliant, Amy, you're fucking brilliant.

Oh, shut up, you bitch.

She shook herself, rolling her neck to crack it. She slid her bookmark between the two pages she'd slumped over and slammed the huge paperback textbook shut, shoving away from the table as she did so. The click-clack of quick wooden fingers against plastic keys was a steady soundtrack that she usually found calming because she knew that sound meant Dennis was well-entertained. It also meant he wouldn't be distracting her from her work—something they had both found out very earlier led to some pretty nasty verbal lashings on Amy's part, and consequently a lot of harsh scoldings from Robert and Rosemary about Amy's temper.

Unfortunately, combined with her already-distracted brain, Amy found the click-clacking to be just a little annoying.

"Den, could you close your door. You're distracting me a little," she called, making her way across the room to the kitchen. She pulled open the fridge just as the clicking of keys stopped, and sighed heavily when she heard the tell-tale thunk of Dennis's heavy bedroom door meeting its frame. "Thanks!"

Pulling out a stick of butter, Amy contemplated how much macaroni and cheese she should make. She was pretty hungry, and if she made extra, then she could just heat it back up for dinner later and only have to cook for Jet. She grabbed the milk and shut the fridge with her hip, almost tripping over her own feet on her way to deposit the two items on the counter by the stove.

Clutz.

Shut up!

She managed to fill up a pot with water and set it on the stovetop to boil before her day—no, no, no, her month—took a turn for the worst.

There was a knock on the front door, and Amy's first thought was why the fuck isn't he using the doorbell? Her second thought was that she should call Dennis out.

Ignoring her better judgment, but following the pull in her gut, the teen went to answer the door. The door squealed as she pulled it open and she looked down at the large wooden trunk on her doorstep.

She dragged the trunk into the dining room, huffing from the weight.

Footnotes:

[1] Source: wiki/Cleopatra

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