Life is a Disaster (ch 1)

         If you have not read my "Life is a Disaster" intro, this could be hard to follow. So read the intro





         When I was a little girl I used to have vivid dreams about the life I wish I had. I'd wake up, crying, in the middle of the night for my mommy and daddy and sissy. Mrs. Nurse would run in and calm me down, gently holding me and soothing away the tears. Eventually, I'd fall back asleep in her arms and return to the gumdrop-sugarplum dreams of normal four year old girls.

         Every night was the same. I'd wake up at roughly midnight screaming and crying and kicking, and then finally fall asleep in Mrs. Nurse's loving embrace. The next morning, I'd barely remember any of it, and while Mrs. Nurse was obviously lacking some much-needed sleep, she was always bright and cheery.

         I never really understood the situation I was in. It took me until I was in middle school to own up to my life and start telling people that A. I am an orphan and B. My parents and older sister were brutally murdered when I was three years old. Apparently whoever offed my family didn't get the memo that there were four of us and I was left behind, crying in the closet. I don't remember very much about my family, but every once in a while I'll glimpse an image so fleeting I wonder if it was just my imagination. I hear laughter and feel my sister's arms around me on a two-person swing while my dad pushes us and mom video tapes the scene. Again, I'm not sure if this ever really happened. There's no video of this, and its the only "memory" I have involving my birth family, aside from the night they died.

         I remember very little about that night, as can be expected. I was barely three years old. I remember someone crying and carrying me to a closet in a room. My sister was in the room and looked at me with wide eyes and a finger to her lips. Then the closet door closed and I heard screaming. After that, I suppose I was transferred to the African Children's Foundation somewhere in Kenya. That was where I met Mrs. Nurse. When I turned five, I was shipped away to a different children's home to begin my education.

         I should explain something--I was born in Sacramento, California, but my parents were supposedly on a mission trip in Africa when they were slaughtered.

         Anyway, once I was transferred to A Future and a Hope: "A home for orphaned girls who are well cared for and receive good private school education, food, clothing, shelter, and integration into a loving, Christian family" back in California, I became a bit of a handful for the caretakers. I didn't want to be with any family but my own, and Mrs. Nurse was the only family I had left. She had luckily been transferred with me, so I was still able to be with her, though she still worked with the toddlers. When I was in eighth grade, I decided I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, for high school. I applied to multiple private schools and landed full-ride scholarships to three of them. I ended up choosing, with help from Mrs. Nurse, an exclusive school in Tahoe, Nevada called The Academy for Future Legends. It boasts top-notch courses in music, science, mathematics, and relatively any career field there is.

         What I didn't know was that there was a reason I was accepted and a reason Mrs. Nurse pushed for me to go. She knew what I was, she knew who my family were, and so did the school. It turns out, the school was not simply for raising the next generation to go down in history and do amazing things in the world. It's a school--quite literally--for nut jobs. Every single one of us has had something seriously crappy happen in our past and every single one of us has "weird" traits.

         It just so happens that I'm a witch.