Bryce Taylors District 3

I'm a tomboy, plain and simple. I like to wear what's comfortable. I like wearing boyish clothes. I also like wearing hats, baseball hats, fedoras, ski caps. You'll rarely see me without one. I don't feel comfortable without one.

I keep my hair in a pony most of the time, though it doesn't keep the hair out of my eyes. My hair is cut in a choppy layered style, with bangs that need to be cut. I have naturally dark blond hair, but I dyed it black using jet black ink I found in my dad's office. He wasn't too happy when he realized what I had done, but I needed a change. He should be glad I didn't end up using his red ink. My hair is usually cut just above my shoulders, though I've been letting it grow out a little so now it's a little ways past my shoulders.

I'm about 5' 4", average weight. My complexion is fair. No matter how much time I spend outside I never tan. And I spend just about every waking moment outside.

I have almond shaped eyes that are the color gray. Sometimes my left eye twitches, thanks to a cut on my left temple. It hit a nerve. My teeth are white and straight. I have a hear shaped face. My nose has been broken before, you can see a bump because I refused to have it rebroken. Dad wasn't too happy about that.

I'm easy-going. I usually go with the flow. I get along well with other people. Not a lot bothers me. I'm not overly friendly but it's not my top priority to be liked. I can stand to be alone.

I used to have a boyfriend, James Hackle. His father works at this factory that makes cars, a place I spend a lot of my time at. Out of all the things I've put together, cars, vehicles, things with engines in general, are my favorite things to work with. James was bringing him something to eat and that's how we met. I recognized him from school, from my grade. We both have an interest in mechanics, that's how we got to know each other, how we became friends.

We were good together, being with him was amazing. He loved me for who I was, and I loved him for who he was. He was my best friend, he was the only person I could talk to about anything. He knew me better than anyone else did, even myself. Which is why I had to break up with him. He knew me too well, he knew when I was upset, when I was hiding something. And I couldn't risk him finding out the truth.

I do alright in school. I'm not the best, but I'm not stupid. I just don't have a hunger for knowledge. I can sit in school, do my homework, but that's it. I'm more into hands on things. I like to tinker, and figure out how things are made and how they work.

My dad is a little high strung, everything has to go his way or he freaks out. He has expectations of everyone and if you don't follow them he won't hesitate to say how disappointed he is. He loves my older sister more than he loves me. And that's the truth.

She's the only one who's ever done what he's expected, she's the only one who has never let him down. She's a born people pleaser, problem solver, and he loves her for that. She's spent her whole life trying to please him.

Everyone loves my sister, Whitney. No one could hate her. I didn't hate her. Sometimes I resented her, was disgusted by her behavior. But she was my sister.

I hate my dad. He's the reason Mom left, the reason I feel like I don't belong whenever I'm at home. I resent him for the way he's made my life up to now.

But I'm determined to act like his words don't get to me. That I don't care what he thinks. I do what I want to do, come home when I want to come home. He doesn't like it, he is always yelling at me for it and maybe that's the reason that I do it.

Dad can't accept me for who I am. He owns a computer factory and makes a good amount of money running it. We have a nice house, we have a comfortable life. His whole life he's worked hard to have all of this. He's ambitious and thinks everyone else should be. Me? I'm the oppposite, I'm content with fiddling with gears and wires. Sometimes I think I should have been born into a different family, one that makes their living working in a factory.

I stand up for myself, if I don't no one else will. Even if my sister is some kind of angel, she would never take my side in an argument, especially if it were with my dad. I learned at a young age that the only person you should count on is yourself. I generally get along with people, but when I have a problem with someone, or someone has a problem with me I'm not afraid to call them out on it.

But Whitney's murder has changed things a little. I'm more hesitant to speak out, to enjoy what I do have. I guess I'm afraid that what happened to her might someday happen to me. I know too much and it's only a matter of time until it all comes back to bite me.

Though it's not just that I'm afraid. I'm also being accused of killing my own sister so that's also kind of put me on edge. Dad doesn't really know what happened that night, he only believes what he sees. He doesn't know what happened that night, but I do.

My mom left us when I was four. My memory of her is a little hazy. I remember her tucking me in at night, telling me that she loved me. But I also remember the fights. The ones between her and Dad. I don't really remember what they were about but I can imagine. She probably wasn't happy with their life together. She probably expected more. She probably expected a loving husband who adored her, not one who spent his day out or in his office. She was probably lonely, she was probably tired of it. When Dad wouldn't change she left him, she left us.

My sister tried to fill her shoes, she practically raised me after she left. She was seven when she had to learn how to grow up. The weight of Dad's expectations heavy on her shoulders. She acted like that's how she wanted it, that she enjoyed pushing herself as far as she could go. But I think she must have gotten tired, that she was probably dying to leave the life that had been handed to her.

I blame my mom for abandoning me, I resent her for not taking Whitney and I with her. But I blame my dad for her leaving, I blame him for Whitney's short childhood.

I grew up in a cold home. Whitney tried to make it warm, she tried to make everything seem perfect. But no matter how much she tried Dad would never love us the way he should have. We were not his joy, his greatest achievement in life. We were a nuisance for him and he's probably just as mad at Mom for not taking us with her as I am. We were only ever tolerated or remotely cared about if we met hisexpectations. If we did overly well in school, if we were interested in the things he was interested in, if we cared about the things he cared about. He wanted us to be perfect so his role in our lives would be easy. So we were just two other people that lived in the same house as him, but also two people who were linked to him, two people he could be proud to call his, anything less and we were a chore. Dad loved Whitney because she did everything he wanted, he hated me because I was trouble, because I challenged his expectations. He doesn't like that he can't control me.

I was ten when I became interested in fixing things, making things. I remember going to the market with my sister one day, running errands. I didn't want to come along but my sister made me. We stopped at this one stand, some produce stand that was run by a lady in her mid thirties. While Whitney was picking out apples and cucumbers I was transfixed by the woman's husband. He was sitting on a stool beside the stand working on a wind up alarm clock. After a while, when he noticed me watching him he asked if I wanted to help. I remember nodding and then going over to stand next to him while he explained to me what he was doing. He told me about the gears in the clock and what he needed to do to fix them. My sister left me there after it was evident that I wouldn't leave. I spent two hours watching this guy take a clock apart then put it back together. I thought it was cool. He made it all seem so easy to do. I liked that you could find the source of the problem and fix it. All you had to do was look for it and then take the time to get it back to the way it was supposed to be. Easy. Easier than navigating through the problems in my life.

After that I kept going with my sister to the market and I sat with the guy, Hubert, while he taught me everything he knew about fixing things, about the way different things worked. He did odd and end jobs for people when he wasn't working in a factory. It was how he passed the time. He was the one who got me the job at the car factory. He was friends with James' dad. Girls my age don't usually get those kinds of jobs, but Hubert knew I wasn't like other girls and he knew I needed something more than just clocks to fix. I needed something more complex. I'm good at fixing, at putting things together. Hubert said I had a natural ability.

I got the scar on my temple from a little mishap at the factory. I was working under the hood of this beautiful car and I didn't hear James' dad next to me, I didn't see the drill in his hand or how close it was to me. So when I straightened up from ducking under the hood it scratched against the skin on my temple and dug a little too deep. There was a lot of blood but you always bleed more when you injure your head. I was fine really, people made a bigger deal out of it than it was. The boss almost let me go because he didn't want me as a liability. But that was more because I was a girl than because of what happened. It was just a stupid accident that I'm a little embarrassed about to be honest with you.

Nothing really bad happened after it, I mean my eye started twitching, which is annoying and is uncomfortable when it happens but I can deal with that. The only really bad thing was that my dad found out about me working at the factory. He had a fit. Yelled at me for hours saying I shouldn't waste my time there, that there were important things like schoolwork, that I shouldn't associate with people who were in a lower class than me. He tried to keep me from working there for a while. Eventually he got tired of it, he wrote me off as a failure that he couldn't fix.

The broken nose is a more recent scar. It happened after my sister was murdered. Some girl at school was talking shit about me, saying that I got off easy for what I had done because of who my father was. So I hit her. I'm not proud of it, and it probably didn't help my case much but she made me mad and I just lost it. And she retaliated by punching me in the nose. I got suspended from school for starting a fight, the girl didn't get in trouble even though she broke my nose. Dad took me to the doctor but I refused to let them fix my nose. Dad got all mad about it because he didn't want me looking like some criminal or something. But I didn't want to be fixed, I wanted something to show for me standing up for myself.

I'm sure you're dying to know about Whitney. About the night she was killed. Her and I hadn't been getting along. She always tried to get me to reform to be like her, the perfect daughter so that we could be a 'perfect' family, so that Dad would stop yelling at me. But I always ended up saying something mean to hurt to, to get her off my case. It wasn't a secret that we didn't always get along. People at school couldn't understand why I was so mean to her, they thought I was jealous of her life. In reality I was disgusted by how much she tried to be everything Dad wanted her to be, because I knew that no matter how hard she tried he would never be satisfied.

So when she died and I was found there at the scene, naturally I was the biggest suspect. Even Dad thinks I did it. He'll protect me from the law, he'll cover things up, but that's just because he doesn't want to be the father of a murderer, he doesn't want everything he's worked hard to have crumble because of me.

Even though he covered up any real evidence leading to me people at school still think I did it. Because I'm the only person they know to have disliked Whitney in any way. I am the only killer who makes sense to them. But the only thing I'm guilty of is knowing who the real killer is.

He's the guy you would least expect. He's was just about as popular with the people at school as Whitney. He's the guy every girl would have loved to date, the guy who's good at everything, who belonged to a rich family. He's well mannered, and was nice to everyone at school, in the district.

Him and my sister were dating. They'd been on a few dates. I saw them together here and there. Whitney stilled lived with us, even though she was done with school and she was twenty. I think she thought she was doing me a favor by staying. She must have thought that I couldn't make it without her there to keep everything civilized.

The night she murdered I was coming home after hanging out with James after work and I heard my sister in the kitchen talking to someone. When I made my way to the door I heard her started to freak out and then there was some banging around. I got there just in time to see him bash my sister's head against the corner of a cabinet. He was yelling at her, saying something about her being a tease. I guess Whitney wasn't ready to take their relationship to the next level and he didn't take it too well.

He kept banging her head against the cabinet and I didn't realize exactly what was happening until it was too late and Whitney's eyes rolled back into her head and she went limp. I must have said something because the next thing I knew he was turning around and letting go of my sister, letting her body fall to the kitchen floor with a thud.

He had his bloody hands around my neck, cutting off my air supply as he threatened to do the same to me if I didn't keep this a secret. If I didn't take the fall. He still had the sense to cover up his tracks. I was a convenience to him, it was lucky for him that I had walked in on the mishap. If I hadn't he wouldn't have had someone to take the blame. Everyone would believe I had done it.

He left out the kitchen door and I sucked in all the air that I could to fight off the black spots filling my vision. Then I went to Whitney, tried to wake her up even though deep down I knew she was gone. All the blood on the floor and the dent in her skull was proof enough for that.

That's when Dad walked in and found me standing over her body, her blood all over me. He started yelling at me, asking me what I had done. He ordered me to take a shower once he took in the scene. He took my bloody clothes and burned them in the metal trash bin in his office, not the fireplace because people would see the smoke coming from the chimney. He ordered me to dump the ashes outside in the backyard and then told me to clean it out to get rid of the blood smears. He didn't even cry when he realized that Whitney was gone, didn't even mourn. Thinking about it makes me sick and only backs up everything I've ever believed up to now. That to Dad Whitney and I were just two obstacles he had to move past, one he could easily get around while the other he had to fight to ignore.

After that he told me what to say when the peacekeepers came, I didn't even try to tell him that I didn't do it, for once I listened to him. We made it look like I had found her there like that. That she was already dead when I got home. The two of us were questioned but I wasn't found guilty. In the end the peacekeepers made it out to be a break in gone wrong and left it at that.

The kids at school thought I was guilty though. Now I'm avoided in the hallway and the close friends I did have I pushed away, even James. Even though he was the only one I could count on, the only person who didn't doubt my innocence. He stuck by me through everything.

But he could tell that there was something I wasn't telling him. And I knew that eventually he would get the truth out of me. I didn't want either of us to get hurt. So I ended things with him. Stopped talking to him, completely caught him out of my life. Though I still work at the car factory with his dad so sometimes I can't avoid him. I should give it up, find a new job. But that's the only time in the day when I feel like myself, when I feel safe.

Everywhere else I'm always glancing behind my shoulder or trying to ignore what people say. Life at home is worse now that Whitney is gone. Not just because Dad thinks I did it but because I feel like I'm walking on eggshells trying to keep myself out of trouble so that Dad won't decide to turn me in.

I've seen Whitney's murderer a few times in the last six months since he murdered her. Just in passing, in a crowd, at the market. Everytime I can feel him looking at me. And I just pray that he keeps on walking, that he won't try to get me alone because he's decided he can't take a chance with me, knowing what I know.

But I'll keep his secret. Because I know how to take care of myself and because I know that it's the only thing that's going to keep me alive.