Pg. 15

When I woke up, he'd gone. It was the first time he'd snuck in my window. Sometimes he'd come and sit under it and we'd talk. Those times when I wasn't allowed out, those times when I had to sit in my room and hide. Then, if he needed me, he'd come and be patient.

Climbing in my window was new. And it was dangerous. And I loved him for doing it.

But he'd left while I was asleep. I moaned, softly, into my pillow. I turned over. And found him, standing at the door, watching me. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled and put his finger to his lips.

"Shh," he said. "They've all gone out, did you know they were leaving?"

Of course I didn't, it wasn't something I needed or cared to know. And so they'd gone and I was alone in my room with Aaron and he was walking slowly over to the bed, a smile around his eyes.

"Have you forgiven me?" He asked. And of course I nodded. As if there were any danger of my not forgiving him. Which of course there wasn't, and he knew it. He smiled before I even agreed.

He knelt in front of the bed and smiled. "Wanna play a game?" He asked. The butterflies in my stomach took flight and caught fire.

"What kind of game?" I asked.

He smiled. "It's like the skybusting game. Watch." And he closed his eyes and reached out his hand to touch me. He rested his palm on my stomach and held his breath. When I didn't do anything, he moved his hand slowly up, over my top, and stopped at my right breast.

I couldn't move. My breath caught and he opened his eyes. He smiled at me, wistfully, quizzically, and smiled, questioning. But I didn't move, didn't say anything. Didn't know if it would be possible to do either, and it probably wasn't. He took his hand off my breast and climbed back onto my bed. He lay down next to me and fell directly asleep.

All I could do was lie there.

Pg. 14

The next morning, I pretended to be sick. The phone rang and rang, and I pretended to be sick. I lay in bed and I listened to him call me. I knew it was him. And then I knew it wasn't him and he'd enlisted other people to call me, to find out what was wrong. And I knew he knew something was wrong. Maybe he even knew what was wrong.

I didn't.

I had a queer, butterflies burning in my stomach kind of feeling, and I kept dozing off and waking with a start, as if he'd touched me. But he wasn't in the room.

And then he was.

He climbed in through my window and sat on my bed.

"Cyn," He said. "You're being an idiot."

"I'm sick," I told him. He stared at me, all seriousness, except for his eyes, which were laughing at me. I rolled my eyes. "I am!" I told him. He reached over and touched my face, and I really did feel as if I were going to be ill, right there, right in front of him.

He passed his hand over my eyes and I couldn't seem to be able to keep them awake anymore. And I felt calm.

He sat next to me and talked softly to me. "I'm sorry," He said. "I shouldn't have looked."

God, what a fool I was! Probably still am, too. I felt so smug, so happy, so heartened to hear him admit that he'd lied, that he'd cheated. As if that changed anything. As if that made it so that he hadn't looked, or hadn't lied. Or wouldn't later.

He told me to lie on my side and he rubbed my back for a few minutes. Then he lay down next to me and we fell asleep.

Pg. 13

I don't care.

It doesn't really matter.

They say it's bad luck. And so what? If the things I've been through don't show that I've got bad luck, and got it bad, then what else can I be afraid of, where luck's concerned.

Still in the dark, but it's okay. It's cold outside and I'd rather be in here, listening to the wind, than expected to go on my tedious walks to nowhere.

Just before we entered schooling at the castle, Aaron and I spent the entire summer together. Hardly a day went by that I didn't see him, and not a single one when I didn't talk to him.

It was like a dream, except it was more real than that and it made me grateful that I didn't have to wake up.

Aaron had a new game for us, he'd seen it in a movie. We would lie on our backs on the roof above his pool and strip naked, the tiles rough against our skin, the wind cool.

We would lie there, watching the stars, with something, a towel, a bag, a box, lying between us so we couldn't look at each other. He always stood up first and looked at me. I never looked at him, though. The thought made my heart pound in my throat, made my palms sweaty and my toes tingle. But I knew he was looking at me.

One day he reached over and touched me, pretending to brush something that he shouldn't have been able to see away from my skin.

"You've got a bug on your stomach," he said.

I jumped, it burned. He could make my skin hot or cold by just looking at me. When he touched me he could set me on fire or turn me to ice. I could have sworn, later, that he'd left a welt on my side, but no one would believe me and it was gone the next morning, anyway.

"You can't have seen a bug," I told him. "You're looking at the sky."

"I could hear it."

"Mmm." I grabbed my clothes, pulling my shirt on first. He grabbed my hands and forced them behind my back so he could look me in the eye. He stood there, naked, on the roof, on a starlit night, and he stared at me.

I was always jealous of his boldness.

He stared at me, and I could feel goosebumps raise, not just on my bare skin, but everywhere. Except for where his hands held me, my wrists stiffening from his grip, feeling cold and stuck.

"I didn't know your skin would be soft like that," He told me. And he smiled. "I want to touch you again, just on your stomach."

No. "No," I told him. "I've got to go. I think my wrists are bruising and I have to go."

He held me tighter, shook me a bit and kept staring at me. As much as I loved Aaron, he could really make me hate him, make me scared.

Finally, still smiling, he let me go, he handed me my clothes.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

I've never been able to figure out why he looked so proud right then, and he sure as hell wouldn't ever explain it to me.

Pg. 12

Sometimes I go a long time without thinking of things, of the past. Sometimes it's all I can think about, and I tell myself to embrace it, live with it.

It's been a while since I sat down and thought about Aaron. I've been busy. The people guarding me, they put me into a dark room sometimes. Not to be cruel, but to keep me quiet, when they can tell I've been thinking too much.

I've been in the dark room for a while, now.

As always, when I'm left in here too long, I start to imagine I'm not here. This is the problem with their solution: It sometimes brings me full circle.

I usually end up here for crying out in my sleep. I've been told I used to sing in my sleep. Now I cry out and wake up in dark rooms.

Anyway, I've been thinking. About the past, because I can't see what my future might be like. But it doesn't really matter right now, what I think about might be all I've got later.

Aaron and I would play, and the girls would get angry. They would ask me questions about him, wondering what he was like, why we played so much. The boys accepted me blindly, like boys do.

Aaron and I would talk, and everyone would draw closer, trying to hear the secrets we whispered, trying to understand what would make us laugh so hard together, in ways we never did when others were apart.

Aaron and I would sneak out to meet each other, and our mothers would grow concerned. Mine because she couldn't remember who I might be out meeting, and his just because she knew who her son really was.

And so three years passed, like this, with secrets and whispers and laughter and jealousy. And suspicion. But I was never suspicious, no matter how much I wish I could say now that I was.

Pg. 11

And so this is how it started.

When I was eleven, Aaron moved back to town. I'd only been there for two years, but they were the years that he'd been away.

Everyone welcomed him warmly, and I knew why immediately. He had these giant green eyes that would stare at you, focus on you, ignore everything else while you were talking. Or ignore you completely.

He had power, it came from him in waves, off the top of his head, from his eyes, his hands. You could feel it when you sat next to him. And it might not have been any real kind of magic, but you could tell when he was thinking (his body hummed) or angry (his body vibrated) or happy (his body purred).

Everyone always tried to make him happy.

After a few days, he really started to notice me. It wasn't love, we were only children. But we'd hold hands, we'd talk, and he'd whisper stories to me when we were alone, which was as often as he could make it.

But the very beginning?

"Who are you?" He asked.

I told him. "My name is Cynara. It's stupid." It wasn't just stupid, of course. It showed my parents to be who they really are: Strange, different, far too liberal, not following the same Books as everyone else. It showed me to be who I really was: A child with a strange name, strange ways.

"Cyn," he laughed. "Perfect. My mother will hate you, Cyn, and your name will make her angry. You should come home with me at once." His frankness and strange forms of honesty always scared me, more at the beginning and the end than in the middle. But that's when things were complicated, as they always are, at the beginnings and the endings of them.

So everyone noticed that he chose me to be his friend, and people who had never paid me attention before started listening. People who'd been cruel to me before were jealous, but kinder. People who'd been... Friendly, friendlike, anything but friends, were scared.

No one would ever explain these changes to me, but eventually I realized, I saw, I understood.

I didn't go home with him that day, I went to my home instead. In fact, it was months before I finally agreed to go home with him.

In that time, we would wander around the yard between classes, holding hands, whispering, joining in other games. But he always singled me out, and I felt really special. The easiest way to lead people astray is to make them feel special, I see that now.

When I finally went home with him, his mother didn't hate me. She did hate my name and offered to have me baptized.

"But I've been baptized, when I was a baby." I told her.

"You can't have been. 'Cyn' is not a real name." She informed me with a sweet, sweet smile on her face. She was a cartoon mother, with chocolate cookies and milk at the door every afternoon when her many children got home. She always had extra for the strays they brought back with them, too.

"Oh, but it is, it's my name." Things are so simple when you're 11. It was my name. Never mind that it didn't feature in the Book, that didn't matter. How was I to know my parents had decided to keep me a pagan forever, regardless of my beliefs and pursuits in faith?

His mother just looked at me, still smiling, but clearly not enjoying the turn this conversation had taken. She had obviously decided that I would be overjoyed to be re-baptized with a more suitable name, one she had chosen.

I wasn't.

But she let me play with him anyway, she kept serving me cookies. She would invite me over for dinner, and allow me to sleep over in his sisters' room if I wanted to. I rarely did, but there were times when I needed it and she never questioned me outright about why.

She never called me Cynara, either. She changed my name, something good and Bookish, something she could understand. She chose Chrissa, which was close, but not quite. It was still pagan sounding, but in reality meant "anointed," and this was good enough for her.

Pg. 10

My teeth ache. No, they don't really. More like they feel completely hollow, as though some creature is living inside me (Which I don't doubt. And besides, that would exhonorate me in a way I cannot do on my own) and has sucked all the good, healthful and living stuff out of my teeth (Again, no doubts here. It's almost reassuring in a deeply disturbing and frightening way).

Perhaps it will start with my bones next.

Perhaps I am, as I keep imagining, being poisoned, slowly. Very slowly. Too slowly even for me to notice. It's definitely a possibility, I'm not very well liked here. Although I'm sure the guards wouldn't let it happen, unless...

They were doing it themselves.

I'm alone a lot, it makes me scared and paranoid.

Pg. 9

She's been in my room, Nor. I know that shouldn't be possible, and I guess it isn't, but it's happened.

I came back from my short walk outside, my ten minutes in the sun, which sometimes the nuns let stretch to fifteen or even twenty. I guess today might have been longer rather than shorter, I can't really tell. But it must have been.

When I came back to my room, it had the feeling of having recently been vacated by someone furtive. And there, above my bed, etched into the wall, was one of her little symbols:


There it was, scratched, rudely, I'll admit, into the grimy wall above my bed, a slightly darker brown than the wall itself. Admittedly, this was below her usual exacting standards, the ones that she used to tell me meant she was an artist and I just scratched out drawings to please myself. But what was one to expect, really, when I'd been gone at most twenty minutes and the wall wasn't as soft as it looked?

It was undeniably her work, and it was undeniably staring me right in the eye.

Nor didn't like to be quiet, not ever. But she wouldn't ever say anything real. She would talk for hours about how angry she was and why, but when it came to finer emotions, she would quite simply shut down.

These pictures were her way of communicating smaller emotions, the ones that mattered. And the one she'd left in my room, the one I was staring at right that second, the one which was causing my heart to beat as if I'd just seen a ghost (For hadn't I? Okay, maybe not...) was telling me she was unhappy.

I'd like to think she was unhappy for me, rather than with, but the chances of that weren't too good. She was generally unhappy with me, even when it wasn't my fault.

And I'm pretty sure this, what's happening right now, is my fault. All mine.

Pg. 8

I have not died. The crusts were not poisoned. But I have not slept, either.

I keep thinking of the two of them, Nor and David, dancing around eachother, dancing around me. Trying to make me dance, too.

I keep thinking of the games I played with David, his hands on my body, his fingers fumbling for things I did not understand. My fingers fumbling towards his ecstasy.

And how I loved those games.

I didn't understand them, but I didn't think they were wrong. Even when Nor told me they were. Of course, I never told her my full thoughts on anything, never even told her all that we did or said, not that she would have believed or understood me.

He was different to her. He was different with her. And he was different after her.

He hated her, but was drawn to her, something I would see again and again in the time I knew Nor. People did not like her, she was not likeable. People couldn't stay away, either.

She didn't have powers, not the kind that run in my family. But she was able to tell someone she was beautiful, and they'd believe her.

They'd praise her softness, her pliability, her delicacy.

She was reedy and looked weak, but hid some strange strength. An angry strength.

She was not pretty, she was clumsy and callous. And people, once she told them she was, would tell me how beautiful they found her.

"Fathomless deep eyes," they would tell me. Her eyes were grey and clear and dull, nearly see-through. The eyes of an Ice Princess in a fairytale. Eyes that showed me only greed, anger and fear. And which she convinced others were warm and caring, deep and deeply blue. But which weren't.

"Perfectly shaped lips," they would describe to me. Her lips formed a "moue" like an old time starlet without her makeup. But as we grew older they got thinner and meaner, with small creases at the sides. And still I was told they were perfect.

"Hair like spun gold" or honey or sunshine, depending on the lyrical bent of hte speaker. In reality, her hair was coarse as a wash pad. I know, I've touched it. I've woken up with it under me, around me, scratching at my cheeks. It wasn't like anything that'd been spun, but rather something created, tangled and left.

Her beautiful body they'd describe to me. Her beautiful body, with it's sharp turns and angles. A softness others would tell me about, but I would rarely see. But I'd touched her, hugged her, felt her. I'd felt the points of her bones, the places where most girls have meat, even at a young age, and which on her filled out, but still remained hard like bone or spikes, something protective. Definitely not soft.

I don't know if she knew what she was doing, exactly, or how she did it, but she had a glamour about her, she could create blinding magics. And most of the time, but never when it mattered, I could see right through them.

But never when it mattered.

Pg. 7

They're either trying to fatten me up or poison me, I'm not sure which. But I think I know why.

There is a constant scrape outside my door, as though the guards posted there do nothing but rub against the walls, use the rough stone to scratch an itch in their backs or sharpen their knives. Which may be the case. I have not been given clever or kind guards, just men who believe and do what they're told. Just men who believe I'm bad, or dirty, or evil.

It's hard to tell what I'm supposed to be today.

I think I might just be crazy.

If they're trying to fatten me up, it's for the creatures in the woods. They'll tie me there, leave me there, and let the creatures have me.

It makes more sense than trying to poison me, since everyone in town wants to know that something terrible has happened to me. Although I'm sure the right poison, the right symptoms, could appease the village.

There's not much to do here, besides eat. They won't let me have any books, afraid of what I might make of the texts I find within. Maybe that's why they keep bringing me food. Maybe it's as innocent as that.

I'll have some crusts and go to sleep.

Pg. 6

He left me there, at the edge of the woods. He left me there, unable to move. And I could hear the creatures behind me, crashing through the trees, heading straight towards me. I could hear them, and I could hear my heart, and I knew that they could hear its crash, crash, crash, and that they were heading right for me.

I stood there, eyes closed, listening to Aaron's mother screeching and banging. I listened as some other child got yelled at and started crying. I listened as a cow lowed in the distance, and I listened as the creature behind me came to the edge of the stream and stopped, moaning in desperation and anger.

I ran.

I ran straight up to my room and I hid, beneath covers that were not warm, but were protective. I lay there and I breathed heavily and then my mother came in to wake me up.

I walked slowly to school on legs that still shook, my heart still pumping furiously beneath my chest.

I bumped directly into Nor.

"You look terrible!" She said, with her characteristic glee when she got to give me good news. Or bad news that involved me, which she also considered good.

Pg. 5

Aaron and I would talk still, for a while longer. And although he had kissed her, although she had run away, he would never talk about Nor anymore.

He'd ask me, instead, what I did with myself. He knew there was nothing, that I did nothing that did not involve him or Nor. I would make up stories, stories about other friends I had made, a happy girl to whom people flocked, just to feel better about themselves.

A while after he kissed Nor, he started the games again.

One night, while hiding in an alley on the edge of the woods, he used his hands to do things that were not kissing. While he did this, he told me about his new friends, the ones that he liked to be seen with during the day and into the gloaming. The friends he left when I came around, because he didn't want anyone to know about our games.

"Porter likes to set fires. He set one yesterday and left one of my books near it. They all thought it was me. My mother near on tanned me bare." Here he lifted his shirt so I could see the marks, dark streaks, some tinged with faint tracks of blood.

I hated looking at the marks, but loved that it distracted his from hands from my skirt, where they were kneading and bunching but not actually doing anything. He had ruined so many of my skirts that way.

"Why would you play with people who cause trouble for you?"

"You cause absolutely no trouble for me at all, Cyn." He would do that, make up names for me that sounded dangerous or interesting. Mine wasn't. But he liked to feel like it was, like I was. It made him feel I was worth playing with.

"Not me, Aaron. Those boys. Everyone knows who they are, those boys. Everyone knows they're the ones who tore up the funeral field last summer and everyone knows they're the ones who stole that man's horse last month, and everyone knows --"

"That I'm one of them?"

"You're not, Aaron."

"I'm no good, haven't you heard?"

And of course, I laughed. What he meant was that everyone would tell him, over and over again, that he wasn't any good, that his brothers and sisters had all or would all amount to something. That he wouldn't. And instead of being bothered by it, he embraced it. He ran to those boys, the ones that revelled in being ignored like dirty secrets. He wanted to be a dirty secret, too.

"You're laughing, Cynda, but you know I'm right," He reached for me, it was time to play again. "You know I'm right, and you like it." He began not kissing me, and a light went on in my parents' house. He pulled me further into the shadows.

"Aaron, girl, I know you're there," It was my father. Of course he knew we were there, if he thought about it hard enough he'd know what we were doing, too. Aaron cringed, as though he could read my thoughts.

"Aaron, your mother is looking for you." He closed the door and the light disappeared. Aaron pulled me into the shadows, closer to the woods, and I froze. He seemed to like me freezing, and grabbed my hands for one last round. Then he shuddered and patted my head before running off across the village in the direction of his home.

I closed my eyes and listened closely. I could hear his mother screeching in the distance, and the firm slap as she hit him squarely with something large and flat.

Aaron never made a sound.

Pg. 4

There is a place that haunts me. It is not, probably, the type of place someone else would look at and immediately understand to be a haunting place. But we humans each have our own histories and concepts and ideas, some of which spring from fact and understanding, but most of which just appear to us, in a nightmare or a dream, and which then become the things of legend or horror in our mind.

For me, this place is one of both horror and legend, lodged in the back of my skull, knocking to be remembered. By day it is beautiful and peaceful, but by night creatures and monsters lurk and roam, alternately hunting and watching.

It is probably they who will finally have me.

My childhoom home is a small grey cottage. By no means idyllic, it housed, like most other homes, secrets, both happy and terrible and of course, neither happy nor terrible. At most times it was just a home. And sometimes it was part of the haunting.

Behind it lies a copse of trees, many of them old, older than man, or at least older than the people who put the cottage here. At the edge of the village, there is a forest, and my home was the house just before the edge of the village.

I've seen them in there at night, large creatures with large yellow teeth. They pace just behind the small stream which runs through the woods, the only thing that keeps them from running into the village -- Into my home first.

No one believes me, although the creatures cry all night, loud, futile cries of frustration that echo throughout the village as soon as the moon drops behind the horizon. Maybe other people have seen them, know they're there. But those people don't admit to it.

I wish I hadn't, either.

During the day small creatures live there, it is their domain. They flit and sparkle through the flowers and trees, granting wishes perhaps. Keeping the creatures at bay, even. They're small twinkling things that are mostly just seen out of hte corner of the eye.

The larger night creatures are best taken in by squinted eyes, turned away from them. Or not at all.

They are large and vaguely resemble men. They stand on legs, they swing their arms. They're hairy and stare with red and green and orange eyes.

I do'nt know if they're evil, or even if they're really there. But they watch me. And no one can stop them from doing it.

It's funny how sometimes you think that you're over something that used to scare you, worry you, wake you in the night. And then one evening you're chasing your favourite cat or niece or boy around a corner, and you're faced with the tall black trees, squeaking in the wind.

And you stop and look around.

And you're sure you can hear footsteps approaching you, but of course you freeze. Because this is like a nightmare, and you can't ever run in nightmares.

When the trees start crashing, when the leaves are rustling furiously, you stand and watch, knowing that this time is the last time you'll come around that corner at night. Or ever.

And the only thing that rescues you is someone's voice, a dog's bark... Something that draws your attention from the creature in the woods. Because if it sees you standing there...

I grew up by these woods, know them like the back of my hand.

And this is why I know what lives inside them.

Pg. 3

Nor liked to come to my house. No one was ever home, and when they were, they ignored us. At her home her mother paid too much attention. Nor was a miracle child, born 10 years after her mother thought no more childern would grace her. Nor's mother drank. Nor's life, Nor's thoughts, Nor's desires were all part of public discourse at her house.

At my house we hid.

My family were strange, although they call it gifted. My mother was a healer, my father was a viewer. Nor was obsessed with this life, and would ask me about their powers.

"Areyou one of them?" She always started with this. I didn't like hte look in her eye or the tone of her voice when she said "them," lumping me in with people I barely knew, rarely saw, couldn't relate to.

"No."

"So you can't do any of their tricks?" And of course, loyalty would cause me to bridle at the use of the word tricks, but you couldn't tell Nor that. You had to be careful, always, to never give her any more to hurt you with than she could get on her own. Even while I was falling in love with her I knew it. There was a brief time when I forgot, and that's where the trouble started. But this was a year before any of that happened.

"No." Of course I could. I could look at someone and tell what would happen to them, sometimes in minutes, sometimes in years. Sometimes there was nothing to be seen, and this was almost more scary than the things I could see.

She knew I was lying. Just as she could tell what Aaron and I had done, just as she could figure out how to take him, she could tell when I was lying. It was a power, but not strong, and not of the type that she was interested in.

"Tell me something, tell me my future. Tell me whether Aaron and I will get married." She loved to hurt people, loved the look in their eye when she said the one thing she shouldn't.

"I don't know anything. You'll get married. You'll have children. Your life will be boring and commonplace. No Aaron." Aaron was neither boring nor commonplace.

Nor did he belong to her, despite the attention she tried to get him to pay her.

Pg. 2

Have you ever wanted to disappear so badly you could envision what the world would be like without you? Have you ever been more than convinced that you were invisible and it didn't matter?

Have you ever thought how nice it would be to be needed?

Elenore. She's the beginning of hte story. And she needed me. At first, she really needed me. And no one else did.

My best friend, Mary, she didn't need me. She'd developed her own life, she'd been sent to a special school, one that she didn't like to talk about. One that I eventually stopped asking about. She was jealous of Elenore and Elenore was jealous of her, but they were never really rivals. First Mary was clearly more important, then suddenly it was Elenore.

Elenore noticed me only because she noticed Aaron. He was able to do that to people, make them notice him. I think that's why he was so easy to follow and why no one noticed I was doing it. Everyone followed Aaron. And I wasn't too noticeable.

Elenore would grill me, questions about Aaron. What he liked, what he did, what he thought. She was trying to prise information from me about him, and I would give the barest possible, just to get her to leave me alone. I thought if she felt she knew something she'd go away.

She didn't. Not then, anyhow.

Aaron couldn't stand Elenore. "How can you look her in the eye and not laugh?" he'd ask me. And he was right. She was too tall, too thin, too blonde, too ridiculous. She was like a long stalk of corn, looking for the most interesting breeze to bend to. She was gullible and dull, and everything we mocked when we were alone.

Aaron liked to sit in the dark with me and ask me things about Elenore. "What does she talk about?"

"You." I could feel him smile. Aaron liked to be talked about.

"What about me?"

"She'd like me to explain to her how to make you kidnap her and haev your way with her." He'd laugh, then reach over and make me do things that didn't involve kissing.

"Does he talk about me?" She'd ask.

"Yes." More than I liked, but not in the way that she wanted.

"Can I have him?" She knew. Somehow, she knew what we did. She'd look at me and I could tell that she knew what we were doing in the dark, when no one else, not even me, knew what we were doing.

"If he'll have you, you're welcome to him."

This always made him laugh.

"You promised me to her...?"

And of course, one day she got him. And he kissed her. But that was all she'd let him do. Once she caught you, she learned to run. Once he'd kissed her, he forgot about not kissing me. And so I was stuck with Elenore.

After a while, her name degenerated. She went from Elenore to Lenore to Nor with such grace it soon seemed that she'd never had a full name, only the abbreviations I made up for her. I made them up and other people believed and used them. That was one of my powers. People didn't look at me, but they listened and I could make them believe. In a bag of powers such as I've got, it's a good one to keep to hand.

And so, although this story starts with Aaron, it's only a way to lead us to Nor, to show you what happened when I knew her. And to show you what I let happen when I thought I was safe.

Pg. 1

Do you ever look back at what's happened throughout your life and realized that you can pinpoint exactly when you took the wrong turn that ended you up in your current situation, be it good or bad? Have you ever looked at yourself, your past self, and realized that you should have turned left instead of right, or said yes instead of no?

I can show you exactly where I went wrong.

This is a story about my ending, but of course everyone knows that htere are no endings without beginnings. So now it's up to me to look back and trace the veins, the markings, the roads I followed to bring myself to where I am now.

When I was fourteen, I started school. I followed my neighbours son, the boy I'd been in love with since I was twelve. There were two schools in our town, and I went to the one he chose.

I chose it for him, he chose it for his family. They had all gone to this school, ever since this school had existed. And since my family were new to the region, or newer than most, I didn't have any family ties. So I chose his ties to lead me.

He was pleased with my choice. We would play together, dirty little games with dirty little secrets.

We would play like this for a while, until one of us was unwilling to go further. I was always the one who wasn't willing to keep going. And I paid for it. Just like I paid for everything else. Of course, this story is about paying, just as much as it's about the roads you choose. It's a story to show that everything is worth the price, as long as you know what it will cost you. And at the time, I thought I did.

His name was Aaron. Such a simple name for the boy I followed to my doom. Just a normal name. And just a normal boy, really.

There were so many in his family. He slept in the closet at the top of the stairs. Some of the children had rooms, some of them shared. Aaron preferred to sleep in the closet on his own, all by himself.

And sometimes me.

We weren't lovers. He never kissed me. We touched, we petted, we talked. But he never kissed me. If he had, then this story, the one I'm telling, the one that was meant to happen, wouldn't have. And so clearly, that would have been a better choice than the ones I made.

If he had kissed me, we'd have become lovers. If we'd become lovers, I'd have become a mother. I am not a mother.

It was never meant to be.

Now this school, known around the village as The Palace, it was as formidable as it sounds. It didn't look like it had been built, although they were constantly telling us which sections had been built, and when.

It looked like it woke up under a hill one day and stretched it's way through. It looked as though, when it found itself on top of the sleeping hill, it liked what it saw. It looked as though, liking what it saw, it decided to stay. And stay it did.

It was perched at the top of the village, and the other school, the one I did not choose, lay at the bottom.

My parents didn't much care which school I chose, as my parents didn't much care about anything I did. The school seemed well enough, had a good reputation, produced fine, upstanding and often imposing adults. Aaron seemed well enough, had a good many brothers and sisters, a feat my parents never aspired to but found admirable in others. All the brothers and sisters had fine, upstanding and often imposing Book names. My parents had never aspired to follow the Book, but found this an admirable trait in others.