"Once upon a time-"

"No good story starts with 'once upon a time'," Joe scoffs.

"Well, mine does. I'm not going to waste my creativity on telling my life story to you," I snap back, and begin again.

she lives in a fairy tale
somewhere too far for us to find
forgotten the taste and smell
of a world that she's left behind.

Once upon a time there lived a girl who thought she'd be a princess. Life was perfect, as close to perfect as the life of an eight-year-old could get. Two loving parents, a twin brother (her best friend, although she'd never admit it), and really, everything else she could ever ask for. At that age, when Barbie dolls and Disney princesses take precedence over boys and rockstars, it was so easy to get lost in a fantasy world inside a little kid's head.

The day of her ninth birthday was the day that all changed.

It started normal enough, with Sam, her twin, tackling her in the morning, screaming "Wake up!" at the top of his lungs, still wearing his Superman pajamas. Breakfast was waffles, made with the Mickey waffle-iron the family had gotten on their first (and last) trip to Disney World. She picked out her nicest, prettiest dress and skipped around her room for a half hour, twirling and spinning, keeping that princess dream alive.

Maybe she should've known it was too good to last.

They were called out of school that day to the news that their parents' building where they worked was under lockdown – a gunman had gotten in and started shooting people. Two were dead, three were in critical condition. For the two kids, that meant that their father was dead. Their mother was almost there.

The girl remembers going into her mother's hospital room, hand-in-hand with the elementary school guidance counselor, seeing her mother lying there motionless, bloody, and dying. She remembers tears, screaming, and the sound of a machine making a constant tone, like a blur of the beeps. A flat line.

And then she remembers the social worker, sitting in offices for hours, hand-in-hand with Sam, still crying. Foster home after foster home, they were always sent back again. It was always her fault, she knew, for being nonresponsive and locking everyone out of her room, spending hours sobbing and trying to live in the past. Not even her brother could break her silence, through her tears to comfort her.

One year and seven foster homes later, she runs away. To this day, she still remembers the color of Sam's eyes, deep brown and sorrowful. (She was named for the color of her eyes – silver.)

She hasn't seen him since. It's been eight years.

it's all about the exposure,
the lens, i told her.
the angles are all wrong now
she's ripping wings off of butterflies.

"Three and a half," Joe remarks, bringing me out of my story-telling trance.

"What?" I ask, wiping a tear from my eye.

"Three and a half years since I last saw Nick," he says. "I mean, before yesterday. So I guess I sort of know how you feel." He's hiding something, I can tell, but reading minds is more Arie's thing, not mine, so I don't try to invade. "Every day, Silver, after you've lost a sibling, after they've been taking from you – it hurts, everything about it hurts. Maybe you don't realize what you did to Sam, but you realize what you did to yourself. And it hurts to be on the receiving end of it, to find that someone you love has been taken away."

He's right, and I realize that this is the first time in a long time I've thought about Sam. "That's why I regret it." I sigh, looking away. "Because sometimes, when I see Nick, and how he thinks – and talks, don't look surprised, the kid never stops talking about you and Kevin – I see who Sam could be today."

He nods, awkwardly trying to put his arm around me until I glare at him and he quickly pulls it away. "Keep telling the story," he presses.

I try to forget the pain this brings and press on.

so one day he found her crying
coiled up on the dirty ground
her prince finally came to save her
and the rest you can figure out.

She runs, and keeps running for weeks, running not for the destination but perhaps for the journey. There was no destination, just a reason to leave, to go. And she never stops, because if she stops, it gives her a chance to think, and she doesn't want to think. For her, now, it's best to leave her memories in the past.

But her heart hurts, and it's no longer just for her parents.

It's a month after she first ran away that everything changes, once and for all. It's a month afterwards she meets a girl, a girl like her, with no family, no one really to live for, that she wants to live for, anyway. She lives behind a fence, in the dark concrete building some local told her not to go anywhere near.

And for a month after that, she keeps on going to see this girl – her first friend in a long time. Her name's Fawn, she's smart, funny, and she can do things that are absolutely incredible, like move objects with her mind and sometimes, shapeshift into a little deer, like her name might suggest. She sleeps on the porch of a vacation home, and steals food from wherever she can find it, but despite everything, this small Appalachian town begins to feel like home.

Then one day Fawn doesn't show up. And not the next day, or the next day, or the next day. She wonders if it's her fault, because everyone she seems to be around goes away and never comes back.

Everyone except for Sam. She left Sam herself.

She cries herself to sleep by the fence one night, trying to make herself believe it wasn't her fault. Raindrops kiss her skin, beading up and soaking her to the bone. She's cold, but she can't bring herself to move. Maybe she'd die right here in her puddle, and that would be okay. She'd be with her parents.

But she's not so lucky.

That night, a man finds her lying there. "Are you okay?" he asks in a sugar-coated voice. She shakes her head no, no, she's not okay, she's lost everything and everyone she ever cared about. "Would you like to come inside with me?"

There was no little voice inside her head telling her no, this man was promising warmth and that was good enough for her. She nods, and he picks her up and carries her inside.

Naturally, she wakes up in a dog crate the next morning, warm and dry yet captured. This is when things start to change – big time. All the other kids eye her enviously, and she stares right back. There's something weird about each of them – whether it's their appearance (some seem to be half bear or fish or something) or the way they act (twitching, etc) or something, they're all different. And when they whisper, calling her the new girl, they always imply that something bad is going to happen.

There were three girls, she learns, that went into the labs and never came back out again.

She knows that already. Within the first hour, she'd already seen one kid die right before her eyes. One of the weird ones – he had fur growing all over his body. She didn't want to end up like him. She'd already been labeled a freak before – all because of the color of her eyes.

Strange how here, she was almost normal. Normal until the day she was taken out of her cage for the first time and carried into the labs. She didn't even try to fight; didn't want to prolong the experience any more than was necessary.

"Good luck," she heard someone whisper. She didn't want to think about what would happen to her. All she knew was that it was going to change her life even more drastically anything ever did before.

but it was a trick
and the clock struck twelve
well make sure to build your home
brick by boring brick
or the wolf's gonna blow it down.

"They tested on you?" Joe looks horrified. I nod, sheepishly looking away. At this point, this cold nostalgia is getting to be unbearable. "I mean, you look normal."

"Yeah. I was lucky." I laugh dryly. 'Lucky' is hardly the word for it. "I was one of the most successful prototype they've ever had. In other words, I didn't die." Pause. "All but four did." I choke back my tears. "Joe, you don't know how little of a chance Nick had to live going into this. I'm not going to call us lucky, but we were fortunate to live – if you call living like this fortunate."

"Live like what?" he asks. I already realize that I haven't really told him anything about us, but sometimes, like now, I just want someone to vent to. Innocent as he was, Joe didn't stop me two seconds into my story. He'd heard me out.

"Always running. Surviving. Sometimes stealing." He raises his eyebrows. "You try getting insulin from anywhere without health insurance."

He nods. "So, um, what happened to you? Like, because of the testing?"

"Well…" I hesitate for a second. Last chance to save his innocence. "I, um, it's, um, best to sort of, um, show you."

"Um, okay, um," he says, sounding both sarcastic and annoyed simultaneously. He's making fun of me, and normally I would be annoyed by that, if it were Nick or Jayden, but Joe just makes me giggle nervously and… blush.

Going through adolescence in a laboratory, I've never really had a crush before. This crazy kinda crush-feeling, heart-beating fast, dizzying feeling is, well, dizzying. For once, the first time in a long time, I feel normal, like every other girl who has a crush on some celebrity pretty-boy who has a killer smile and hair that he can flip out of his eyes.

Then, once again, I realize that I'm not at all normal because said pretty boy is sitting next to me on the ground, waiting for me to do something supernatural and impossible. He's also my best friend's brother, which is a different subject matter entirely.

I sigh, maybe a little overdramatically, because Joe copies me, and focus on a stick across the pathway that cuts through this Minnesota forest. Slowly, I'm able to lift this stick up (with my mind, it might be worth adding), and bring it over to drop in the rockstar's lap. He gapes at me, mouth wide open this time. I shrug and continue my story.

well go get your shovel
and we'll dig a deep hole
to bury the castle, bury the castle
go get your shovel
and we'll dig a deep hole
to bury the castle, bury the castle

She doesn't remember ever falling asleep, but she remembers waking up in a new room, a smaller one with a large window. That's all she cares about right away, is that window, a gateway to the outside – one that's been bolted shut and can't open.

Then she realizes that the door to her cage isn't locked.

Slowly, she pushes open the door a little, a little more, then all the way so she can climb out of the cage and stand in the stream of sunlight pouring in through the window. She stares out the glass, loving the sight of the Appalachian Mountains slightly blocking the sunbeams, the blue sky, the clouds, the everything about this.

"Hi!"

This new voice is confusing. She hasn't heard anyone talk to her like that here before – if you talked in the old room, they would take you out and hurt you. She spins around to see not one, but two different girls standing there, wearing jeans and sweatshirts like any other normal ten-year-old girls. She's wearing something like pajamas, but certainly not something that fancy. "Hi," she whispers back, trying to remember if the two girls had been there when she had first looked around.

"I'm Lizzy," the girl who spoke first says brightly, twirling her brown curly hair around her finger. "And that's Arie." They both are sucking on lollipops. She wants a lollipop.

"I'm Silver," she whispers quietly, cautious of new people. "Is it better here?"

"Than outside? Tons better." Lizzy's very talkative. Arie hasn't said a word. "They let us do what we want, as long as we don't leave. Although sometimes we convince them to let us do stuff. Like, with our minds."

"That doesn't sound weird at all," Arie mumbles. "Liz, she doesn't know anything."

Lizzy nods slowly. "Oh. Yeah."

"They changed us, like everyone else," Arie says. "But we don't look weird or anything. Instead, we can do stuff that they can't, that other people can't. And they probably changed you to be like us."

Silver looks away, her hands trembling. "So… I'm like you?"

"Probably," Lizzy says. "It's not as bad as the other people, I guess." She sighs. "I wish we could help them. But if we leave, well…" She motions to the plastic bracelets around her ankle, and Arie's, and Silver's. "They can find us. And they're not very happy when they do."

"We tried to escape once," Arie says. "But this other girl, Fawn, who used to be with us, she told on us 'cause she didn't want to come, and they brought us back and took her away. We haven't seen her since. Not that we want to," she quickly adds.

Silver nods, fighting back memories of meeting with Fawn when she was still free. "So…"

"It's the same thing everyday," Lizzy says. "Come on, we'll show you around. That's what we're supposed to do, anyway."

It is the same thing everyday, and for two years the three girls live together in the lab, going through periodic testing all for the price of a little bit more freedom than their more scientifically unstable counterparts, the kids in the outside room. Their routine is interrupted twice by the arrival of two new kids exactly like them, except for the fact that they're boys. Jayden and Nick are welcomed, especially Nick's guitar. Silver loves Nick's guitar, and the music he can play on it. So does Arie, who seems rather infatuated with the boy when she's not arguing with him about something or other. (The one thing they can agree on, it seems, is baseball teams, which still isn't an argue-free subject because then Lizzy makes a comment about how the Red Sox are better and it's New York verses Boston all over again. Not that you can even follow baseball in a laboratory.)

But science isn't perfect.

On Nick's sixteenth birthday, they find Lizzy dead in her dog cage.

And life as they know it ends all over again.

keep your feet on the ground
when your head's in the clouds…
well you built up a world of magic
because your real life is tragic
yeah, you built up a world of magic.

I see I've once again scared Joe speechless and spend the next two minutes of silence wiping tears from my eyes. "I'm sorry for your loss," he mumbles finally.

"You don't understand," I choke out. "They killed her. They told us themselves. They wanted to see how we would react so they killed one of us. They're sick people, Joe. Don't ever, ever mess with them." I sigh. "But that's inevitable now, because I've told you all this and you know too much and they don't want anyone to know, so they'll kill you." I pause, maybe more for dramatic effect than anything else. "Or worse."

"What's worse than death?" he asks.

"Losing someone you love," I whisper. He opens his mouth to speak, I cut him off. I know he's lost Nick, that's not what I had meant. "Forever."

He's silent for a second. "Meaning…?"

"Kevin."

if it's not real you can't hold it in your hand
you can't feel it in your heart
and i won't believe it
but if it's true you can see it with your eyes
oh, even in the dark
and that's where i want to be, yeah

...you're better off without me.

trying to be evil like chibiyugixyami... failing I know. review please :) kthanks. love you all.

brick by boring brick -paramore. just so we're clear.