kiko. six.

 

I'm not a bad person.

I have a little sister to look after. That's all there is to it. Seven years old, nine years my junior, but she keeps me going. Keeps me living. Sissy needs someone looking out for her, and that someone had to be me, and I'd rather live this life and work this hard and at least try to make her life better than watch her be miserable and alone. I know what the consequences are if I'm caught - a bullet to the head or worse - but she's worth it. She didn't ask to be born into this world, and neither did I, so the least I can do is try and make living worth it for the both of us.

We're not orphans but these past few years its certainly felt like it. My Mom and Dad are around but they're absent people, invested in their work and each-other more than anything else. I came along by accident, and then several years later so did Sissy. Whoops, they chuckled, not again. And then they went back to their lives, their jobs, their relationship. We were fed and bathed and clothed until we could manage it ourselves and they stopped caring as much as they did. Whoops, they forgot to cook dinner. Whoops, they forgot to pick us up from school. Whoops, they forgot my birthday.

I turned fifteen, the third whoops in a row, and decided to take matters into my own hands.

Nobody suspects a tiny, scrawny kid like me. Mom and Dad certainly don't ask questions. I tell them my after school club is about learning first aid and they just nod and go back to their own conversations. That tends to be the extent of my interactions with most adults - a smile and a nod or a thumbs up seems to be enough for them. The squeaky voice and run-along sentences probably help too. Adults just want me to sit down and shut up, little do they know that's actually what I want them to want.

Because like I said - nobody suspects a tiny, scrawy kid like me. My clothes are too big for my slim body, hands hidden in sleeves and knees hidden in seams and rusty scissors cutting up my bangs unevenly. They look at me with a backpack on at 7am and think I'm off to school. They look at me walking around the neighbourhood amidst the other kids at 4pm and think I'm going home. There's an art to being invisible that I think I was born with. I must've been, else perhaps my parents would have noticed me enough to try harder.

Nevertheless, being invisible is a gift as much as it is a curse. I work in the labs filling prescriptions 4 hours a day, five days a week. It's a dull job, operating machinery and counting twelve tablets in a row day after day after day, but I leave with pockets filled of empty containers and discarded, faulty packaging for the Night Shift. Sissy gets half of my money for clothes and food and school supplies, plus a little extra for cake on her birthday or a cookie on Fridays. I like seeing her smile. The way her cheeks stick out as she grins, the way she skips home on a little sugar rush. I make sure she's got enough to feed herself and tuck her into bed and skip off to the Night Shift, smiling at people on my way.

I find that if you radiate a happy energy, just enough to not make it obvious, nobody thinks you're up to something. I've got crooked teeth so it's probably not the best smile but everyone else around her is pretty miserable. Some of the Peacekeepers even smile back, give me a little nod, say "Evening miss". I tell them I'm going home, blink up innocently, hook my little thumbs around blue backpack straps and they nod me through without a second thought. I tell the ones in the morning I'm going to school, changed into another oversized sweater with faded leggings covering up chicken legs and knobbly knees.

It works, for the most part. I've just got to keep track of my story. Nobody's switched shifts yet, so it works for me, but the under-eye bags and the giant yawns are probably telling. Even on the days it doesn't work I just make up a story about how I stayed at my friends house or I'm going to collect my sister and they just smile - because a skinny kid with neatly-trimmed nails and a twinkle in her brown eyes skipping off down the road with a smile wouldn't be doing any harm. 

They're kind of dumb, and I do feel a little bad for lying - but like I said, I'm not a bad person. I actually know some great people at the Shift, all of us Numbuhs are around the same age and are there for the same reasons. The Boss laughed the day I turned up and asked for work, said I was the third kid in there that week so they called me Three and didn't ask for my real name. Kiko Verte is a factory worker. Three is a delivery girl, a medicine and bandages girl, a pill-swapper girl. Kiko Verte is happy-go-lucky and Three is lucky that she's so happy all the time.

You'd think I'd be a little more down-beat with the lack of sleep and absent parents and the constant fear of fucking up the Night Shift in the back of my mind, but somehow I've turned out okay. Don't get me wrong, some nights it all gets a bit too much and I cry myself to sleep from sheer exhaustion but I really do try to see the good in everything. It gets me set up for disappointment on the odd occasion, but nothing fixes that like a good cry in the bathroom. Let it out, pick myself up, remember why I work so hard.

Every hour at work is another dollar in the bank, another meal sorted, a new pair of shoes. Every Night Shift I get to see my friends, see Four and his cute smile and his shiny hair and his twinkly eyes. Every morning when I'm walking to work I get to see the sunrise. Sometimes, in the winter, I get to see the stars on a chilly cloudless night and watch my breath puff up toward the sky to join them. It's the little things in life. What other option do I have but to at least try and be happy?

So I dust myself off. Force a smile. Will myself to be positive. If I'm not happy, I'm nothing. And if I'm nothing, then I'm just a stranger. A number. A bullet to the brain. Worse.

I think I'd rather be happy than dead.