farah snowspire, 10.

Someone once told me I had only child energy. That tracks. Pity I got thrown into this crumbling shithole of a castle with a dozen other kids.

Yeah, yeah, it's a mansion - but could they invest in some goddamn central heating? It snows all damn year! I asked when I was eleven and particularly bitter over the temperature. Even tried to get a petition going, but only three people would actually sign it. The rest drew dicks in the margins or signed Pen Island instead of their names.

Like I said: I was destined to be an only child. Something got mixed up along the way and I ended up in here instead. I have a soul that's meant to be adored, y'know? And I'm deprived of it, sharing the attention of ten-odd adults with that don't even really like us - it's criminal. I know nobody in here particularly likes me - and I don't care, really.

Well - I do. I do care, but I pretend I don't. It got easier sneering at the mean names and taunts rather than bursting into tears and being called a princess, a cry-baby, telling me to Go cry to my Mommy and then I'd yell back None of us have Mommies you dummy! and the next thing I knew I'd have Oscar pinned down, beating the shit out of him on the classroom floor and him pulling my hair and fingernails scratching and teeth biting and people cheering our names 'til Mr. Charlie pulled me off of him by the scruff of my overalls and threw me into the Freezer. 

Not an actual freezer. Although it might as well be. They just call the spare room downstairs - the coldest one in all the house - the Freezer because it's where Farah has to go to Cool Down. But on the way down to the basement I'd hear the cheers and awe-stricken groans at the sight of a blood nose and I'd grin a little, drunk on victory. That was the first time they really saw me. Saw me for more than I was, really looked at me, you know? 

And then I started dancing and they couldn't take their eyes off of me.

---

Professor Dragomir said I had to put that anger to good use somehow, so one day we took the tap shoes off and she played a soundtrack on the phonograph so devastating I just started crying. She smacked me and told me to dance the emotion out, so I awkwardly began tapping in my bare feet until the record scratched and she sent me to my room. I could only come back once I figured out how to turn the tears into art, so I locked myself in my shoebox of a room for three days and turned the anguish into something resembling a lyrical routine.

I cried the entire time I danced, and I cried still when the song was over and I had made my final plie-to-releve, frozen in place, but Professor Dragomir didn't hit me this time. She didn't even yell. She just clapped and raised her eyebrows, forehead lines talking.

"Now do you feel it?"

I felt all of it, so much of it, everything all at once. And it was awful, and wonderful, and I knew that this was going to be mine.

---

I think they started putting me in the Freezer as a place for me to cool off, but then they realised that it was more than that. Being alone, separated from everyone - that's punishment in of itself. As much as everyone that lives here drives me insane most days, I can't stand being alone. You try growing up in a house with fourteen other kids with no clue where you came from beforehand and why you were abandoned here in the first place, then get locked in a room by yourself for hours at a time.

The first time I just screamed, bellowed, slammed my fists on the door.

The second time I had a panic attack so severe I passed out.

Now I'm older I know how to manage it. They put me in the Freezer, I do those breathing techniques they taught me, give up after fourteen seconds, and just shake until the anger falls away. I get to think a lot in there, no sound but the radiator humming and the plumbing in the roof sending water every which way about the house.

I think about everyone, every single one of them. Their secrets and their flaws and their talents. Their best friends and their worst enemies. What they're good at, what they struggle with. Who I like, who I despise, who I wish knew me better, who I'm glad keeps their distance. I think and I think and I think and then I turn it all into movement, running over routines in my head until my hands twitch, muscle memory, and I'm twirling about on my own dancing to the tune of Snowspire swirling around inside my head.

On the bad days I don't dance. I sit there, shivering, and think about why my parents left me here. Who they might be. What they were like. Who I might have been outside of these walls. I shake and cry and mourn a million different versions of me, crushed underneath the weight of so many things I will never experience.

I cry because I miss Oscar, too. Don't tell anyone that. But I miss him. Yeah, the kid I picked a fight with in middle school science ended up being one of my closest friends. We never fought after that. I think something clicked in that moment - a familiarity. Nothing like mumbling apologies and giggling at our reflections in the mirror after a fist fight to bring two people closer together.

Of course you can't have nothing good in this place without someone ruining it. When Oscar left, someone (I'm betting Hanna, that bitch) said that we were only friends because I let him sleep with me for ten bucks and a packet of cigarettes. Which is total bullshit - I don't smoke, for one. I'm not that much of a cliché. And the only time I ever kissed Oscar was with my fists. But the classrooms of Snowspire had decided then and there that at the ripe old age of sixteen I was a whore.

So that I became. All publicity is good publicity, right?

Alain and I were soon an item, but he was as good of a boyfriend as I was a singer in that I am tone deaf and he really did not know how to handle me and my... this. He quickly gave up on me like everyone else min this god forsaken place has. I don't blame him - we're way better off as friends - but it still sucked. Seventeen and can't even keep a boyfriend around? What kind of a slut was I, anyway?

Found those tasteful notes scribbled on the bathroom cubicle two days after news broke that our doomed-to-fail relationship was over. After I'd wiped my tears I planted a red lipstick kiss next to them, reapplied, hiked my skirt up and walked out of the stalls with my head held high.

---

I know Hanna's behind it all. Stupid bitch is just jealous that I have actual talent and people secretly want to kiss me in closets and dark hallways. Just the thought of her makes my skin crawl, that old tale of friends to enemies - maybe I am a cliche after all. Angry little girl finding solace in the quiet one, but I never should have trusted her silence. Silly children playing nice, the world was our stage until she stopped the music and everybody laughed at me. I could have ran off the stage crying something furious and never spoke to her again, but instead I just kept dancing to my own beat.

The tears fell later, and I swore to never say a nice thing to her from that moment on. Smudged eyeliner in dusty mirrors, because I was good out there. But I could have been perfect. Everything she is, was, I reject. She raises her hand in class and I roll my eyes. She looks at me and I spit venom. It's like instinct, polar opposites, late at night I wish on the brightest star in the sky that they take her away from this place before we turn nineteen.

Girls aren't born terrible. Not all of us. But Hanna was, I'm sure of it. And she was the last terrible person in a long line of those that crossed into my sad little orbit that I decided to let hurt me.

At least on the surface, that is.