the fairytales and other stories

the fairytales

So far I've been to thirteen foster homes.

My parents took one look at me and left me for dead, abandoning their house to leave town. But I was found and taken to an orphanage, sharing a room with a girl like me. Nothing about us was normal. I had short black hair, red lips, paper-white skin, and black eyes. My roommate had long golden hair, pink lips, fair skin, and amber eyes.

In a superstitious town like the one we lived in, Wellsbrook, we grew up as outcasted celebrities that were still cool. It was an odd, in-between, can't quite fit kind of feeling, and I hated it. It was at the orphanage, in the town, in my thirteen foster homes. It followed me like a puppy; never quite leaving but never quite there.

At first, I had looked forward to my first foster home, mistakenly thinking that it would work out. I thought that the feeling of not fitting in would go away. I thought that I would be like everybody else. But the woman just wanted me for show. I learned that the hard way, when a group of bullies started calling me "Snow White", after the fairy tale character. I ran crying to her, thinking that she would put an end to it. But she encouraged it and called me "Snow" herself, telling all her friends the new update proudly over the phone.

I ran away that night, packing my things and putting dead rats in her vents. And so it went, just like that. Moving from one place to the next again and again and again.

Honey and I were almost always together. At the orphanage, in a foster home, walking through town. We were that thing that you wanted just to brag about. That one song on your Spotify playlist that you once loved but now it's kinda annoying. To put it simply, we were the black sheep of the town.

But one day, our luck seemingly changed. A woman came to take us out of the town. To a different foster home. The twelfth one. It was in Iowa. I thought that maybe, out of town, we wouldn't be so different. Or something might change.

But if anything, the home was worse. It was so boring there that Honey and I took extensive walks until we were gone for so long that our foster family called 911.

So the woman moved us to New York.

The thing is, New York is that one city where everyone is supposed to fit. The homeless, the rich, the mean, the kind, anyone. But would New York accept us? Two girls, born from luck. Two girls no one would miss. Two girls who were so used to being lost, they accepted the worst when there could be better.

The couple from New York owned a giant apartment on the fifty-first floor without a speck of dust anywhere. You could coat the walls in oozing mud and the floor with stars of broken glass, leave for half a day, and when you came back, it would be as clean as before. You couldn't leave a mark. And it was starting to drive me crazy. After all, I usually left a mark wherever I went. Hardly a good one, but a mark nonetheless.

Honey could tell that I hated it. I could tell that she didn't care that I hated it, and loved it herself. She lived for this stuff, blinding clean apartments in a dirty, merciless city, and shiny, glittery, fake everythings that no one really liked. Being filthy rich and getting what you want in a cheating, cheap sort of way. That was Honey.

Me? I was more of a haunted house in the middle of a twisted wood, living on your wits and instincts sort of person. I liked deep talks and the color black and everything chalky and real, like a favorite record that you haven't played in a while, so now it's dusty but overused. That was me.

Honey and I were opposites in the same situation, so maybe that's why we bonded so well. Either way, you'll never hear just one of our names without the other close behind. Our foster parents, every one of them, wore that fact proudly. They boasted that they used to foster the "fairytales". That's what everyone called us because it seemed as though we were born from fairytales. Odd ones, yes. Twisted, even.