Ophelia Stromstatt// District 10

Sometimes, I doubt that I’m alive. I doubt that I truly exist. I like to imagine. My imagination is more colorful than a rainbow on a clear day. I imagine I’m just some kind of on looking entity that doesn’t truly exist and any interactions that happen between me and other are just manipulations of my mind. Maybe none of us exist and we’re all just some floating matter, jumbled together, buzzing with thoughts, images, and faux feelings that we’ve been tricked into believing are real.

“Quite the imagination,” my first few teachers would nod with a frown when I voiced such things. Soon, I caught on and my school days are still spent in silence. I caught on. My imagination belongs inside my head. If I really have one, that is. If I’m not just a jumble of matter. It comes in handy on the days where I know I can’t afford another detention. On those days, I just imagine my fists beating Ms. Brandow to a pulp and those thoughts satisfy me enough to turn away from her pug-nosed face, sneering right in my direction.

I’m a powder keg though. Light me on fire and I explode. Bombard my ears with enough taunts, enough biting words and I’ll bite back. Hard. I may look small and scrawny, but, as quite a few girls in my grade know, I pack quite a punch. Ma doesn’t know where my explosive attitude comes from. One minute, I’m quiet, eyes on the ground, the next minute I’m on the ground, atop another, beating my fists into their face. These bursts of adrenaline are short-lived. Pull me off my victim and I return to my quiet, sullen self, imagining what would happen if I could continue.

People have a tendency to think that if you get into trouble often, you’re not a smart kid. I like to prove them wrong. “Ophelia, your grades are really something,” my teachers tell me. “Why don’t you stay out of trouble? You have so much potential.”

I have potential, but I also have fire.

I also have a fight in my heart.

You couldn’t call my selfish though. I’ve found another’s enemy under my fists before and it’s all the same to me. However, the only people I fight for are the kids at the community home with me. We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we? Someone’s got to keep the sea monsters from further biting away at our battered forms. They can call me protective all they’d like, but if one of us goes down, we all do. That’s how it is in a family. Families fall apart. One hole in the ship and that’s it. We’ll all screwed.

“Ophelia, such a delicate name,” my teacher told me when I was fourteen. “But, not such a delicate girl…” She frowned and slapped her ruler across my desk. “Sit up! Don’t slouch! And get that awful sullen look off of your face. And speak up, Ophelia.”

But, I’m not talkative. Chances are, I don’t want to talk to you. I want to keep to myself, quiet, painting colors in the open air with my mind. Painting the ground with red whenever I’m offended. That’s the only way I know how to speak to people.

If I do truly exist, I hope that when I cease to, I’m not remembered as that terrible, sullen girl. I hope I’m remembered as a fighter.

A young woman weeps silently as she places a bundled up child on the steps of the community home. For a moment, she can only stare at the tiny, sleeping package, sniffling. Then, the young man behind her gently touches her arm.

“Come on, we have to go,” he says quietly, eyebrows knit. Still crying, she lets herself be lead away into the darkness.

Just before the steps of the community home are swallowed up, she turns back, tears glistening in her eyes and whispers, “Good bye, Ophelia Rose.”

That’s not how it went. That’s how I imagine and wish it went. In reality, it went something like this:

“Get up, you lazy lump,” the woman demands, shaking her husband awake. In his hangover, he only groans and rolls over. “I just get back from the doctor. I’m pregnant again.”

“No more babies,” he grumbles out, pulling the blanket over his head and she cries out in anguish.

“You’re no help.”

An hour later, she’s sitting in her sister’s house, crying. “We can’t even take care of the four we have! Couldn’t you…?” Her sister, a lovely thing on contrary to her sister, shakes her head delicately.

“Jake and I aren’t ready,” she says apologetically. “Why not consider the community home? The child will be taken care of there!”

And so it was decided. Nine months later, the woman again finds herself in her sister’s home. “Too drunk to even bring me to the doctor,” she grumbles, but soon her labor pains start and she’s unable to complain about her husband any longer. Her sister aiding her guides her through it, smiling the whole way, and when the child arrives, she coos in delight.

“She’s beautiful!” she whispers to her sister, but the women has fallen asleep, sweat gleaming on her forehead, not caring a thing for the child just that the child was out of her hands. And so, the sister holds the child to her, rocking her slowly back and forth until the people from the community home arrive to take her away. “Her name’s Ophelia,” she informs them, wrapping the child up, “Ophelia Rose. My, uh, sister wanted her named that. Don’t forget it.”

Sometimes it gives me a bit of hope to know that I have an aunt who apparently helped deliver me. But, then I remember Ma informing me that my real mother couldn’t keep me because she couldn’t support the family she already had. And so, in my mind, I make her and her husband lazy, rude bums and her sister a good-natured woman who would’ve loved to keep me, but couldn’t.

And so, I grew up in the community home. There’s nothing wrong with being here. But, after a while, you begin to wonder if anyone wants you. With no parents, siblings who come and go, and kids are school who taunt you for this, it can get a bit rough.

My room has a low ceiling and callused walls. The bed posts are crooked and my mirror is broken. Sometimes, just imagining the fight can’t hold my fire in. Sometimes, my room must pay the price.

No wonder the other kids stay away from me around here.

I can’t control myself sometimes. And so, I hide. I refuse to make friends. I refuse to speak to the other kids.

Worst of all, I refuse to get too close to my sisters. The Stromstatts.

We’re not really sisters by blood, but we’re tied together by a bond decreed by Ma: the last name she gave us. While that should make us especially close, we’re removed from each other.

Or rather, I’m removed from them.

Sometimes, I fear my fists. I fear where they could land. I fear getting to close just to feel my blood boil over and my vision become blurred. When I was twelve, I hit another one of the community home kids.

I couldn’t control myself. He’d snatched a piece of bread off of my plate while I wasn’t looking. He was new. He didn’t know. But, the simple action set me off. I can still see his blood on my knuckles and hear his cries, ringing in my ears. I can still see my sisters’ faces when I did it. And on that day, I decided that I couldn’t do this anymore.

My life follows a routine.

Get up. Go to school. Come home. Hide. Don’t leave unless you have to.

I, Ophelia Rose Stromstatt, am a fighter. I want to remain so. I love it. I love the burst of adrenaline, the racing of my heart, the gleam in my eyes.

But, I don’t want to be the fighter who hurts the wrong people.

Who can’t control herself.

But, that’s who I fear I’m becoming.