Chapter 1
Lights. Blinking. Changing. Flashing. The stage is a menagerie of dancing color and shadow.
I watch the graceful dancers, the panel of disgusted judges, and the audience of stonefaced people, only an opaque mirage in darkened, faroff sea.
The judges call out the eliminations instantaneously. No one wins. The losers march off left stage and pass through me. I follow them, as though I am nothing more than a marrionette on a string. A dim and gloomy corridor unfolds before all of us. I too, have been eliminated.
Someone bumps into me and keeps walking, head down. I wordlessly folow the crowd, the sound of shuffling feet encompassing the dark, claustrophobic space. Twist after turn, the corridors only become more convoluted.
I trip over my own feet and stumble into the brightened dressing room. All the losers cram together around me like sheep in a slaughtering pen and blot out the little light.
Falling through a chute of black, knees and elbows jabbing into my breasts and back. The odor of sweat clogs my nostrils.
Flailing feet somehow land safely on solid ground. Lit by flourescents, this corridor undulates before us, like a killer snake on the hunt for lost, little, mice.
Still, nobody says a word. Eerie. But I don't dare interrupt the silence enfolding us. Our troop of losers draw to the end-the end of the line- with the throbbing hum of electricity invading the silence. The sound of our footfalls aren't even loud enough anymore to permeate the hanging quiet.
The source of the unsteadily buzzing electricity is a flickering red exit sign over a set of double doors. They swing open of their own accord and instead of a light breeze, only still temperate air greets us as we all step outside.
The day is blindingly bright after the suffocating blackness of the back halls of the deadly auditorium. The light is glinting and ricocheting off the abandoned main road stretched in front of us. The chrome on all the empty vehicles seem to pulsate as they shine. We bow our heads, as though in shame.
Light. Finally. Bright and free. Yet we're at a standstill. Waiting.
One by one, as though choregraphed, our heads all snap up, eyes widening, and breath hitching. But we still don't move.
A fixed dot in the distance. Now not so fixed. My heart rate increases in my ears.
I blink. Thump, thump.
Tiny.
Thump, thump. Blink.
White.
Blink. Thump, thump, thump.
Faceless.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
Hatchett.
Blink. Thump, thump.
Blood splatter.
Thump. Blink.
Red.
My body hits the pavement.
Thump.
And I awake in my own bed, choking on the taste of my own blood.
The red fades from my vision. I lay in a cold sweat on saturated rumpled sheets. I struggle to catch my breath, the taste of copper thick and cloying in my throat. Sickly pale walls seem to critique my every move.
My room is barren. I came to live here three years ago on my twelfth birthday, when my father presented me with a single compact mirror that looks like it came from the trash. “Nothing special,” he said.
Weeks after I moved in here, I started to develope an appreciation for it as it had become my only possession.
I twist around and slide the thing out from under my pillow, running my fingers over the top where my initials are engraved in loose, flowing script.
T.J.
Tamara James. The daughter of a father who left her at an orphanage on her twelfth birthday and went on the run. The daughter of a mother who is now six feet under.
The metal is warm from being under my head all night, but in my own hands the heat rises to scorching hot. Blisters painfully form on my fingers, but I refuse to drop the only object that bonds me to my father.
I feel thin, cold metal slice between my clenched fingers. The shell of the mirror begins to liquidize, just enough for the invisible razor blade to clumsily scratch in a new engraving. My grip automatically adjusts, so the hot metal is more centered and flat in my palm.
The lettering of the new engraving is mininscule. Illegible. But I don't need to worry about that at all.
I stand there, still as stone, for countless minutes while the metal cools and solidifies in my hand. I finally allow myself to drop it on the bed, really feeling the agony for the first time. I bite back a scream.
I tentavely glance at my empty palm, only expecting one giant pussy blister. Instead words are etched into the fleshiest part of my palm, the sharp sting taking on the form of letters.
K A I J A M E S
Beneath the blurred sting of tears, I make out these words branded into my flesh.
My father's name.
Below that, more scratching.
3 16
Today's date.
My fifteenth birthday.
