Her world was black. Her clothes were black. Her hair was black. The things she talked about were black. She, however, was not black; she never had been and she didn't think she ever would be. It was true that she enjoyed horror novels and would rather have dark hair than the blonde she was born with, but she wore her pale complexion and colorless clothes not because she felt a kinship with the night, but because she was hopelessly, utterly lost in the crowd.

She had nine sisters and a brother. Wherever you went in the house, there was a mob, or a line. It was easy to blend in and lose yourself. Her other siblings realized this, she thought, but she was the only one who was honest with herself. Her older sister Luna was the archetypical "rock chick." She played guitar, had short hair, called everyone "dude" and "bro." Her sister Lynn was a generic "jock"; everything was sports. Ball is life, you know. Luan tried to be funny, Leni was a fashionista type, and Lori...well, Lucy had never been able to get a good bead on Lori. She shared certain characteristics with Leni, but they were not carbon copies of one another. It made sense, Lucy figured, that Lori would escape the existential dread of being a faceless cog in a machine: She was the oldest. That was the way she stuck out.

The others, however, had adopted and developed distinctive personalities. Sometimes she wondered if these personalities were exaggerated (Lynn did like sports, but went full bore because go big or go home), or if they were total shams (Luan knowing her jokes were bad and hating them, but telling them because she couldn't come up with anything else). The former prospect was alright, but the latter scared her, because if it was true, it meant that her siblings weren't who she thought they were.

Was she a liar too? Sometimes she thought she was, and other times she was morally certain that she was an exaggerator. She sure wasn't the real Lucy Loud.

But...who was the real Lucy Loud?

She didn't know, and that bothered her. She knew she like horror, she knew she liked walking through graveyards and reading the markers (less out of morbid curiosity and more out of historical interest...she liked history, and contemplating the life and times of people who lived in the 1800s endlessly fascinated her). She knew she enjoyed writing, though she suspected that she wasn't very good at it. Her poems sounded like hollow imitations of poets dead and gone. Increasingly, she found herself writing fan fiction for a cartoon she thought was "cute," and in the beginning she told herself it was fun. It was, but she also thought that she liked doing it because it was easy. When she attempted a short story, she found herself struggling to build characters and imbue them with emotions. She had emotions, she understood them somewhat, but weaving them into a fictional character was difficult. With fan fiction, you could assume everyone knew what the character was like, so all you really had to do was color inside the lines. That was easy. It was also safe.

She didn't pray to the Devil, like some people probably assumed. To be honest, she didn't even believe in the Devil. Or God. She believed that life was organic, and when you died, you simply stopped existing. Sometimes that thought was comforting, because it meant that no one was really burning in a sulfurous pit for all eternity, and other times it was terrifying, because she could not contemplate not existing. You could compare it to sleep, but even when you're asleep you're existing and your brain is working.

The process of dying was even scarier. She remembered reading somewhere that at the moment of death (as at the moment of birth), the human brain releases a flood of endorphins that act as a sort of hallucinogenic. Imagine you're dying, then suddenly you start to trip. What might you see? What might you hear? Demons, monsters, the phantoms of past misdeeds. She laid awake at night, turning that gruesome thought over in her mind the way one would a strange and alien object found in the dirt. She hoped that when she went her brain was instantly destroyed so she wouldn't have to see or hear anything, and wouldn't spend her last dying moments terrified and thinking she was going to hell.

Who are you, Lucy Loud?

No one. She was no one. Just another face in the Loud house, just another average person living an average life. She would grow up, she would die, and one day everyone who knew her would be dead too, and she would be only a name on a headstone. She felt restless. She felt like she was wasting her life. You're eight, she reminded herself, but that didn't help. She felt trapped. Claustrophobic. Sometimes she had trouble breathing. Sometimes she felt so depressed that she wanted to curl up and cry. Rarely, she felt suddenly very happy and energetic. She had read about bipolar disorder, and wondered if she had it. If she did, she had the worst kind: The highs were few and far between, the lows more frequent.

Sometimes she thought of killing herself, but her fear of dying reared its ugly head. But what was a few minutes of an oxygen starved, chemical-flood brain when after that, there was no more bad? She would never be depressed again, she would never feel lost and ignored, she would never feel anything. That thought appealed to her.

And on August 9, she drew a bath, slit her wrists, and submerged herself in the tub.

It'll all be over soon, she told herself.

But it wasn't.