The Fabulous Killjoys: The Story of Fireball Frenzy

Prologue

Tonight is the night I will pack my bags and escape this city I hate so much. As I ponder my stealthy escape plan, I reflect on what life once was. I've lived with my parents for all eighteen-and-a-half years of my life, and the Great Fires happened when I was eleven (I didn't think I'd even survive those). I always remember how cold both my mother and father have always been towards me, how much my father hates women and how much my mother has enabled it and agreed with him, and how I was never allowed to leave the house or spend time with any friends outside of school.
          Then after the Fires, things only got worse. Mom and Dad got stricter, colder, and more closed off. Don't take this as me not wanting to have a better relationship with them; I want to be able to be open with them and be able to go to them if I'm having problems. But they're the ones causing the problems. They won't show any of their emotions unless it's anger or toxic positivity, and they encourage me to be just like them in that sense. The catch? It's pills they both swallow to make them that way. They're bad enough sober, ignorant and giving me the silent treatment every day, but even worse when they're high on the pills that they helped develop. When high, they tended to be meaner and even more manipulative. But now they're always high. I've learned to keep my feelings to myself so well, that I can even fake being on the pills when I'm not.

I was fourteen when the Helium Wars ended, when my parents' side of it won. They gave me the emotion-, creativity-, and memory-wiping pills as soon as they finished making their first bottle. I was essentially their test subject. "Take one every day the second you wake up," said Mom on that morning. "That will make you a good law-abiding citizen of Battery City. We don't want people to show their weaknesses or remember the bad things."
          "It will make you enjoy everything that comes your way, inevitably. Might as well take advantage of them," added Dad. "Make you the smiling, submissive woman you were born to be. Like all women should be."
          The thought disgusted me, but I obviously kept it to myself. To my surprise, Mom agreed with him. "That's right, Lucy. It's for your easier, better living."
          I cringed inside. But all that could come out of my mouth was, "okay whatever."
          They wouldn't let me go free to my room without swallowing a pill from the new bottle they gave me. It was supposedly a "present." Bullshit. I only took my pill that first day, just to see how to act when I would fake being on the pills for the rest of my days.

That day on the pills was the worst day of my life... but it felt like the best day at the same time. I remember standing around my room in my mirror, only seeing blank looks. I couldn't feel anything, I forgot for a day about the emotional abuse I was suffering. Only at the time, I didn't know it was emotional abuse. I thought it was normal for parents to do that to their kids. But I forgot about that for a day. I finally went a whole day without crying. It felt great...
          Until night fell, when the side effects wore off. I realized how problematic my thoughts were when I was high that day. "If I can't feel anything, no one can," I thought to myself. My parents were actually proud of me for once that day, but proud of me for being who they want me to be, not who I want to be. I also thought about murder, about hurting innocent people going against what I thought I believed at the time. I cried myself to sleep that night, the moment the effects wore off and I started remembering everything again. So I hadn't really gone a day without crying. At least I knew how to fake it.

I hated those goddamn pills– I washed every pill down the sink after the first one I actually took, just to make it look like I took the pill each day. I didn't know who I wanted to be after that day. From the day after until around the middle of 2016, I was incredibly confused and crying every day again (more than ever before) through that identity crisis. Then my parents once called me to the couch to "have a talk." Those were the words that made me nervous.
          They started to rant to me about the "Killjoys," how "bad" of people they were to rebel against Better Living, against the government. "They are trying to corrupt your young mind with their dangerous ideologies of anarchy, war, emotions, and... freedom. With their own young minds, too– they are about your age, but stay away from them. Disgusting," said Dad during the talk, holding up mugshot pictures of the four guys.
          "If we ever catch you siding with them or not on the pills," started Mom with a threatening stare into my eyes, "you're evil and you'll either be trapped where no one will find you but us or will be done for. People like those Killjoys deserve nothing but the worst."
          "Okay," I faked. But in my brain, I sided with the Killjoys. Obviously. I liked the fact that they were brave enough to stand up for themselves to be themselves. Even through all my parents' shit-talking on the Killjoys, I was able to see the other perspective this time. I was able to tell what they were trying to do. That was the day I started looking up to and idolizing the Killjoys as my heroes. Even though I had never met them.

I wrote every day about my dreams of meeting them and joining their team. I would draw them how I imagined them to look based on the few pictures I've seen of them. But tonight, in 2019, is the night I'm running away. Before that, though, I drew myself as a Killjoy.
          I now know for sure who I am and who I want to be. Black leather jacket, black leggings, black combat boots, red skirt, red eye mask with little orange-and-yellow fireball symbols, and a red top with sparkles. Hair up in pigtails, and maybe a little bit of makeup. I stayed up late drawing that same look of myself in different poses: holding a ray gun, in a hand-to-hand combat fighting stance, any confident pose I could think of. Of course, I couldn't actually color anything on the drawings because there was only black or white anything in the house. But I just missed when there was color in the world before the Fires.

After finishing the drawings and annotations with them, I put them in a folder, put that folder in my little white drawstring bag along with the few essentials I needed to bring with me, put on my boring white jacket for the cold night ahead, slipped on my white tennis shoes, put the bag on my back, then by eleven that night, I was out my window and down from the fire escape.