of memories

people don't like to hear sob stories. no, really. when someone says i’d love to hear your vents! or i enjoy reading about hardships, they mean they want to hear something that has sad elements, but with joy and normalcy sandwiched in between. they don't want to listen to tales about tragedy upon tragedy. maybe that's why i pretend like i forgot about my past.

my name is heather barebone, but that's not my real name. my birthday is on january 25, but that's not my real birthday. everything about me is made-up, maybe even the story i’m about to tell you.

the facts: i am an orphan. i can speak to the dead. i lived with a traveling fortune teller who decided to retire early and open her own fortune telling shop. i was adopted by a very wealthy man when i turned seventeen, hardly the age most adopters would be excited about adopting a child.

when i was five, i was hit by a car. the accident was pretty severe; i almost died. they had to do some surgeries to my head, stitching it back because it was split open. the consequence of this was i lost some of my early memories. they also thought my sight was a side-effect of the surgery.

now, that’s where regulus gets it wrong.

regulus said i probably don’t remember about my life before madame elba took me under her care because of the accident. he explained it in the way an outsider, an observer would. but he’s wrong.

i do remember. i just choose not to.

the truths: i am an orphan, they found me on the sideways of the road somewhere in santa monica. i can speak to the dead, it’s not because of the surgery; i already have this ability ever since i was even younger than five. under the factory of the country’s biggest weapon maker lies a laboratorium where they experiment on children. it’s led by a woman called canavan. i was one of their subjects. my name was jane 13. canavan used to like me best, i was her favorite subject. until she learned of my gifts.

they ran tests on me; canavan was sure i had schizophrenia or some sort of mental hysteria and she made the doctors say so. there had to be a scientific explanation, for canavan was not a woman who’d dabble in the supernatural, you see. but the bloodied woman whose head was crushed that i saw floating around her office was real. after all, i saw her face in the framed pictures hung on canavan’s walls.

if there’s anything canavan hated more than the dead not being actually dead, it’s damaged goods. and i, with my newly discovered ability, was one. weapons shouldn’t have flaws, she said. i was raised to kill, to destroy, to purge. and being able to speak with someone who i murdered might affect my performance. you’re a liability, jane 13. canavan doesn’t have the need for an unusable weapon. even at the little age of five, i knew that she’d have to get rid of me. she’d have to kill me.

so i ran. i ran until my legs are sore but the factory was still gigantic and looming over behind me and the desert seemed to be endless and there were no other people around that i could ask for help and the guards oh my god the guards were already catching up on me but i kept running and running and running …

… and then the accident happened.

i don’t know who drove the car that hit me. perhaps regulus was telling the truth; maybe it really was the man i call father now.

when i woke up, i was in an entirely different country, in an entirely different continent. the people who paid for the surgeries and took me home were of wealth. i was the child they never had, so they showered me with all kinds of stuff most children usually have. then it happened again; they know i can see the ghosts. unlike canavan, they didn’t try to throw me out, but things changed. imperfection isn’t tolerated in this family. they treated me coldly, which i found even worse than being hunted to be killed.

so, once again, i ran. social services caught me and put me in foster homes. but every time they knew i can see the unseen, i had to be moved. regulus said it was also frederick barebone’s doing; pulling the strings so i don’t have a place to stay until i met madame elba.

that’s the second thing he gets wrong about.

for it was my own volition to run from the foster houses. the new families weren’t disturbed by my sight, but rather they wanted to use me for their own gain. i didn’t want to be a vessel for somebody else’s intent again. and through sheer luck or pure coincidence or strings pulled by frederick barebone, i met the fortune teller. she accepted me as who i am and didn’t try to mold me into something, someone like her. she doesn’t force me into accepting my sight, nor does she try to exploit it. i wasn’t an apprentice until i told her i want to be one. it’s like she just lets me … be.

or so i thought. because, if regulus was right, that means i’ve become a vessel once more. a puppet in the hands of frederick barebone and what wicked game he has in mind.