When I think of my childhood, I think of mayhem. My dad is someone who I barely remember: he had a smile that was always described as ‘charming’ by everyone who met him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two when he left, from what I managed to learn about him. He went away before I was six, though. Like everyone else in my life, he left me.
Mom has always been a mess. I forget when I first realized that the life I was living wasn’t normal. Maybe it was the first time I came home to the ratty apartment on the third story of an old complex and saw the pills Mom had tried to kill herself with scattered across the floor. Dad had knocked them out of her hand and was crying as he tried to reason with her. Mom was crying too, and shaking. Neither of them saw me creep off to my room and drop my schoolbag to the floor—I didn’t know what the pills meant, but I knew they were dangerous.
Two days after that, Dad left. In the old leather bound journal I used to record important days, I wrote two short sentences: Dad is gone and now I’m alone with Mom. I’m scared. – Emily
I had a reason to be scared. The next day I came home to see Mom at the kitchen counter. There were ten empty cans of beer staring me in the face, and Mom was drinking another as fast as she could. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I knew one thing for sure: Dad had been telling Mom forever that she needed to stop drinking, and stop ‘shooting up’. I didn’t know what that meant then either. I’d learn quickly, though.
When Mom drank, she got very, very quiet. She’d just sit there at that kitchen counter with her dirty blond hair straggling from a loose bun, her cornflower blue eyes bloodshot and blurry, crying and drinking without making a sound. Later she’d get up and diligently put the cans by the door so they could be recycled—no matter how drunk she was, for some reason she always did that. And for some other reason, that action always made my heart drop like a stone.
After she set the cans clumsily by the door, she’d pass out. Sometimes she never made it to the couch and collapsed on the floor. I’d have been standing by the doorway of the apartment, watching her drink and then stumble towards me and put down the cans. When she collapsed I’d go in and close the door, locking it firmly before getting down on my knees next to her. I never knew why I locked the door, but it made me feel safer somehow. Like I had control.
Everyday I’d shake her. “Mom.” I’d whisper, knowing it was useless. I had blond hair like hers, and the same cornflower blue eyes. My eyes would fill with tears, and as they fell I’d think that I must look like Mom looked when she was crying. Everyone said we looked a lot alike, and I hated that. I was never going to be like Mom. Never, ever. “Mom.” This time my voice would be choked. She was so still every time…I couldn’t be sure if she was still alive.
“Oh, please…” I’d lie down right next to her, my hands folded under my head and my face turned into her chest so I could hear her heart beating. So I could know she was still alive. I’d go to sleep with the stench of alcohol soaking my senses. There were journal entries during the years that this happened—during the three years between Dad left and Mom died of alcohol poisoning at twenty-five years old. From the very first entry to the last, my journal reads like this:
Today, Dad got me this journal. He says ‘write your feelings in here when you can’t say them out loud. This journal is your friend, and you can tell it everything’. He says because I read a lot, I will write well. I hope so. – Emily
Today, Mom and Dad fought. They were loud, because they didn’t know I was home. I stayed in my room. Mom cried and drank something from a can—I don’t know what it is. Dad didn’t want her to drink it. He’s tired from working all the time. He came in and told me he loved me. It made me happy, but I’m sad that Mom is sad. I’m mad at Dad for making Mom sad. But Mom also makes Dad sad. Grownups are stupid. I want to be a kid forever. – Emily
Mom drinks from the can and then she cries. Every day. Sometimes I think she’s dead. Dad comes home and see’s her, and then he sits down at the counter and cries. He calls her name and asks what went wrong, but Mom doesn’t answer. ‘Grace…be strong, we’ll be okay.’, he says. I think we’re already okay. – Emily
Dad is gone and now I’m alone with Mom. I’m scared. – Emily
Mom is in the hospital, and I’m living with Janet. She’s our neighbor. I asked why she’s helping me, and she said that neighbors help each other. Then she told me I could come to her any time I wanted. I won’t go. She’s like all the other grownups. They think they understand me and they call me ‘sweetheart’. – Emily
Mom is back. There was someone with her, but then he left. He was a nurse, I think he said. But I know he was lying, because only women can be nurses. Women can also be doctors, but men can’t be nurses. All grownups are liars. They say they worry about Mom, and about me. I tell them that if they cared, they’d help Mom get better, but they don’t say anything. – Emily
I haven’t picked this journal up in two years. Not much has changed, though. Mom is drunk again. Today was my eighth birthday. If Dad were here he’d tell me happy birthday, but Mom doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember anything, not anymore. The neighbors all gossip, and I eves-drop on them. They say Mom is going to die soon. And they call me ‘that poor little girl’. I don’t need their pity—everyone pities me. Everyone feels bad for me. I’m stronger than all of them. I’m not a little girl. I’ve been checking books out of the library every day for three years. Right now I’m reading 1984 by George Orwell. Those stupid neighbors wouldn’t understand it, but I do. I’m not a little girl. But I’m scared. – Emily
It’s been six months. Mom’s in the hospital again. She ends up there a lot. The people there are angry with her, though. I don’t think she pays…or maybe it’s something else. I don’t know. They don’t talk to me. I’m with Janet again, and I know she’s scared. She likes me. She thinks I’m like her daughter was, before her daughter grew up. Only she said her daughter didn’t have the same lifestyle I did. I didn’t ask what she meant, because I already knew. Her daughter didn’t have a stupid Mom who nearly killed herself a lot. I wish Janet was my mom. She treats me like an adult, and that makes me happy. But my life isn’t ever happy. – Emily
I’m like the man in the book 1984. Doomed—eventually, something horrible is going to happen to me. Love is worth nothing. I love Mom, but she won’t stop trying to kill herself. She doesn’t care about me. If love were worth anything, she’d stop. George Orwell knew that. He’s a smart man. In his book, there is no happy ending. It’s only the truth. Here is a quote from the book:
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something -- something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer.'
‘No,’ he said, ‘you don't feel the same.’
It’s the truth. Love means nothing. If love meant anything, Dad would still be here. If love meant anything, Mom would stop drinking and doing drugs. And I’m stupid. Because I wish love meant something. I wish everything was okay again. – Emily
All the kids at school are stupid. They want to play tag and four square and other games. Those are little kid games. They all act so young, and it’s annoying. The teacher said that she thinks I act like an adult, but she said it in a bad way. She said that I need to be a kid while I could, and loosen up and play with the others. I nodded and smiled and then ignored her. She doesn’t know anything.
If she—if anyone in my grade—had spent years watching their Mom get drunk or high every day and then crying next to her and praying that she was still alive—if they had spent their time hiding in their room so they didn’t have to hear their Mom cry…then they’d all think playing four-square and tag was stupid.
Then they’d realize that…that…not everything is good. And if they had lived like I lived, they’d be just as terrified as I am. My worst fear is becoming my mom. I found out the other day that she’s only twenty-four, when I found her birth certificate. She had me when she was sixteen. Dad was sixteen, too. I’m scared: scared to grow up and be like her, scared that she’s going to die, and scared that I’m going to die. – Emily
Mom’s twenty-fifth birthday was yesterday. Today, Mom died. Today, I grabbed this book, my backpack, all the money that was left, some food, a sleeping bag, and a couple clothes, and then I ran away. Today, I was saved. A man in a suit told me that I was just the kind of kid his school accepted. I’m not stupid, though. I asked what he meant, and he said I was a young kid with no place to call home and no one who cared about me. It was true, and he could tell.
I asked him why he wanted me. He said that he’d give me a place to stay, food, and better schooling than almost anywhere else. In exchange, he wants to teach me how to fight. He said that his school has top fighters. They fight and people pay to watch them. He says it’s mostly harmless, just for entertainment. But he didn’t lie: he said that some of the fights were illegal, because people got hurt. He says his fighters are very famous, because they win a lot. They get paid a lot.
The way he explained it was simple: if I stayed I’d eventually get caught or get killed. Mom and I never lived in a good place. If I went with him I’d learn a lot, have a shelter and food, get money and learn how to fight. Money, fighting skills and education are the best things. If I have those, I have control. If I have control, I won’t ever be like Mom. And I won’t ever have to be there and cry because I think someone is dead or because I can’t tell if the person is dead or not.
I said yes. He said good, and we got into a nice car. Now I’m showered and in clean clothes. The place I’m at is a boarding school. It’s big, and every new student has their own room and tutor, if they want a tutor. Mine is coming soon—I’ll be learning faster than anybody else. I’m going to be better than everyone else. I’m going to be the best fighter and the best student, and I’m going to win every fight.
– My name is no longer Emily. From now on, I’ve been told my name is Arabella. I won’t be writing in this journal anymore.
~~~
The school was hard, that was for sure. I liked it, though. I fit in with the other kids. None of them were like the kids my age at my old school: none of them wanted to play pointless games or fight about stupid things. There were people of all different colors, but we were all very much the same. Here were where kids who hadn’t lived pretty lives came. There were kids as young as six and as old as eighteen learning here—after that they went out into the world or stayed here and taught.
We weren’t taught normal classes, either. In the morning we’d wake up as soon as the sun rose, and then we were told to run two miles around the outside of the school, which was a fair-sized block of classrooms with a gym on top and a fighting room underground. Once we were done running we’d be given breakfast, and then we’d go to our rooms to be tutored or trained. My tutor was a woman named Stacy: she was tall, blond, smart, and strict. Once she found out that I was reading at an adult level she decided to focus on math, and I drilled for hours and hours on end.
Lunch wasn’t at a set time. We ate whenever we had time. If we didn’t remember to eat, no one reminded us. A lot of times I did forget, just because I was engrossed in learning. In the second week, though, I started fighting classes. Now tutoring took second place—that happened in the morning after running and breakfast, and then from one in the afternoon to ten at night, I trained in fighting. Once that started, I never forgot to eat. I was always hungry, and the amount I was eating doubled.
I was growing, too. According to the older students, that happened a lot when people first came. All the exercise and eating they did made them grow and develop faster. Stacy gave me ‘the talk’ as I started to develop, a sympathetic gleam in her eyes. I didn’t think too much on what she’d told me: there was too much to do. I’d wake up, run, eat, learn academics, eat, fight, eat, sleep for seven solid hours, get up, and do it all again. There were no such things as weekends or holidays. I would have lost track of the days had Stacy not kept a calendar in my room and neatly crossed off each day as it passed.
I turned ten, and that was when I realized how much I’d changed. I didn’t dream of Mom or Dad anymore, and I didn’t wake up crying. I was too tired to dream, and to be truthful, I’d practically forgotten about my life before this school already. I was learning so much every day that details like the life I’d lead before hand didn’t seem to matter as much. Stacy drank, but she would drink a glass of white wine at dinner, sipping daintily as she ate at the table next to mine. It was nothing like Mom’s drinking. Still, it repulsed me. I would never drink, and I’d never do drugs.
The reminder of home made me put even more energy into fighting and learning. Where before I’d only poured my whole mind into it, now my heart, body, mind and soul were into the fighting, into the learning. I literally bled for the fighting. This school was my life now. My classmates were my family. I didn’t need Mom, I didn’t need Dad—I didn’t need anyone. I could do things myself now, I was strong now. And all those people who had pitied me would be scared of me.
I knew it was true. The older students, the ones who had been here for a year or more, were like a different species from the others. They walked and talked and moved with grace and power. You could just tell that they could kill you in ten seconds flat—in any academic argument or in a fight. A lot of them were already fighting as jobs. They’d leave on Friday night and come back Sunday night, exhausted and sometimes injured. I didn’t know where they went, but they fought people from another school.
My mentor was a boy who told me he was sixteen years old. Joshua was big and all muscle—he looked like a truck, but he could move fast as a snake. Joshua was in charge of making sure I was okay and deciding when I should start fighting. Every day he told me that he thought I had a lot of potential, that I could be one of the best. He said it was because I put more into than anyone else he’d ever seen, and he asked why.
I gave him a look, not understanding what he meant by why. “Because I want to be the best. I want to beat everyone. I want to prove that I am worth something, and I am not someone to be pitied. I’m not helpless.” As long as I knew that and other people knew that, I’d be happy. Never again would I be unable to do anything but hide and cry. Never again would I be pitied and talked about.
My name was Arabella, and I was going to be the best. My name would go down in history. They wouldn’t remember me as Emily, the weak, pitied little girl who cried by her mom every night and was unable to do anything but watch as her dad left and her mom died.
They would remember me as Arabella, the top student, the best fighter. My name would make people shiver with respect and with fear that they should ever do something to get on my bad side. I would make a difference. I would not live and die without making a ripple in the world. I wouldn’t die like Mom had, young, alone, frightened and hopeless. I would never be like Mom. And that thought helped me become better, faster, stronger, and smarter.
People started to talk about me: Arabella, the recent recruit who showed so much promise. And on the day of my one year mark at this school, Joshua told me I had been accepted into the ranks of the real fighters. When I walked in the halls or sat at a lunch table, I got looks of respect. As Emily, I had been nothing, no one. The forgotten daughter, the abandoned little girl. As Arabella, I was the best. It was the most amazing feeling I’d ever experienced.
It's been a long time since I posted anything, and these are the prologue and first chapter of a novel I'm writing. Please tell me what you think!
