Prologue
Believe me, I wasn't always like this. I wasn't always the girl in the background. Wasn't always the one who didn't speak. Something caused me to be like this. Something caused me to stop talking. To lock my voice away.
I made that decision over four years ago. I chose to never let my voice out again. That may sound dramatic when you're thirteen. After all, you still have your whole life ahead. Plenty of time to start talking again. Most teenage girls like to exaggerate things, right? No way that I would stay silent for the rest of my life, right?
Well, I guess you are wrong. I've already managed to stay quiet for more than four years.
My case isn't the regular teen girl misrepresenting the situation. It wasn't because of some boy calling me ugly, like you see in cliche movies and stuff. It wasn't because I was bullied into it by classmates or anything. Before The Incident happened that caused me to be like this, I was just a happy content teen, as far as I can remember.
That didn't mean I was a normal teen though. I have never been just a normal teenage girl. Well, I was one. But not a normal, human, teenage girl.
You see, my family and I, we are not human. Or not completely. We are werewolves. We live in a werewolf community. A pack of about thirty.
Our pack four years ago consisted of about fifty, maybe even a little more. A lot of us were killed four years ago. Some slowly, some immediately. I prefer not to talk about those days.
I live with my mum, my dad and my older brother, Elias. Apparently, we used to be very close when I was little, but I don't remember much about that. I don't remember much about anything at all. I hardly remember anything about my childhood. I know some things, some by memory, some by what I've been told and maybe some by imagination.
Our pack is a peaceful one. There have never been fights or big arguments within the pack, as far as I know. We all get along very well. or they all get along very well without me. Sometimes I can't decide between those two.
I know they care about me, especially my family, but sometimes I can't help but feel I don't belong there. Not anymore. I used to, but now I am an intruder.
I feel like a changeling. Someone who replaced the daughter they once knew with someone who didn't know them. Who didn't remember them. And in a way, they didn't know me either.
I had changed in the months they hadn't seen me. I had changed a lot. And despite them handling it pretty well, I can see the sadness in their eyes. I can see it when they talk about the past me, when they talk about memories, when they talk about stuff that happened before The Incident.
The first clear memory I have now, is from when I was thirteen. Is from The Incident. And those are memories I want to forget. But I guess we can't decide what we forget and what we remember. For me, that's the greatest curse in life. The greatest possible punishment. But it is something I have to learn to live with.
