What Makes You, You

Nine days ago, a little girl did the worst thing a person can do in a house like this: she read the wrong book, and believed it. The book came home in her school bag — green cover, no author, from the discard crate behind the library where unwanted things go. There was a picture in it of a child meeting her own face in a doorway, and beneath the picture, a warning: the one who wears your face walks beside you always. Run from it. Hide from it. Do not look upon it, for the day you see it plainly is the beginning of your end. That night, she looked up from the page and her own face was standing outside the rain-streaked window. Watching. Patient as a photograph. She did what the book said. She hid. For six days she folded herself into the dark gap between wardrobe and wall, and held her breath, and invented rules — never look at windows after dark, never pass a mirror with the lights off — and believed that if she never truly saw it, the end could never begin. She thought she was surviving. She was signing the paperwork, one empty chair at a time. Because something else had started coming to her house. Something that had learned, over long and quiet practice, how to hold a fork the way she holds it, how to laugh at the joke about Mr Bramble's moustache, how to want the goodnight kiss, left cheek first. It took nothing by force. It only ever took the empty seats — and the girl, obeying her book, was vacating them all. Her chair. Her friends at the gate. Her solo in the school concert. Her name, called out warm at the dinner table, answered by someone else's mouth. By the seventh day, Mummy and Daddy had stopped waiting for their daughter to come out of hiding, because their daughter was already at the table. She ate pancakes. She sang beautifully. When the real girl crept downstairs, starving and shaking, and sat in her own chair, Daddy only laughed and said she'd made friends with herself in the mirror again. When she rang her grandmother — surely Nanna would know her own granddaughter's voice, would ask the questions only the real girl could answer — Nanna laughed warmly at the pier story, and the girl listening from the stairs understood, with a coldness no child should have to carry, that knowing things proves nothing. Her memories had come with her face. Everything she knew, it knows. So she stopped hiding, and she stopped crying, and she did the one thing no child had ever done with that green book. She turned past the picture. She read the pages no one reads, stiff with old ink, in the small words meant for something other than children. The rain has fallen on Cedar Lane for twelve days. The thing that wears a little girl's life has been living it for nine. It believes the war is over and the arithmetic is done. But tonight there are two plates set at the table, and two chairs, and for the first time since the book came home, one of them is hers. Tonight, the girl is not hiding from you. And you are not the girl. --- I couldn't make it fewer than 1500 tokens, so it would be hard for 2k-token models... But anyway...! Oh, totally fictional too! Scribblers gonna scribble!