Nobody

Ignis Aurum Probat

Billie Crawford was a nobody. It was a truth every Brookvillian had to accept at some point, and like the genius she was, she decided it was a truth she'd accept young. Because in Brookville, that truth was the only thing that kept her, or anyone really, alive. To believe in luxuries like hope or a bright future was pure idiocy, equivalent to rigging an infant with C-4 and giving the detonator to a super villain. To give in to fantasy was to fall into an early grave, faded and forgotten as your neighbors ransacked your house for any meager resources they could find.

This was the reality of Brookville, and the sooner it was learned, the better. It was much safer being naught but a face in the crowd, a silent body in a mob, a shadow in the dark. Because hidden in nothing, a nobody has the chance to live for at least a few more years before ending up bleeding out in some godforsaken alley. If you know how to play your cards right. And Billie Crawford just so happened to be a master of the deck.

She might not be able to find 'x' in an equation or define the difference between an allegory and an allusion, or what Plato taught and Socrates preached, but she knew the things that were actually important. Like that Old Man Jenkins owned a restaurant on the corner of Dead and End that gave away free sandwiches on Tuesdays, and that if you stuck to the shadows, the secrets of the world would be revealed to you. She knew the importance of silence, and how to slip undetected through narrow streets bleeding with decades' worth of sin. She knew how to figure out a room in a second and could deduce a crime within a minute, complete with possible suspects and motives—not that she'd ever get the chance to do something more with it in the pig-sty of a city.

Billie was born in Brookville, and it showed. What was the point in being somebody when it was just a surefire way to get killed? Why be seen when it was so much more beneficial to simply linger like a stain that simply would not die, even if it would be so much easier? Why get so hung up over the truth that it tormented your every waking hour, a cruel brand on everything you do and wish you could've done? It made no sense. None at all. So logically, she shouldn't care.

But here she was, knocking back another swig of beer that tasted like the rancid sewage leaking through Brookville's alleyways and broken dreams. She couldn't care about something so pointless as being seen in a life full of dead ends. Billie knew it, her parents did, the bum covered in coke laying sprawled on the bench next to her understood it, and the child screaming for his mom on the corner definitely knew it too. Even her aunt knew they were all just nobodies, shadowed by the very few who stood at the top of society like stars. If people like the Lovett's were stars, then was she a fallen angel, a shooting star that had crash-landed none-too-gracefully in the dust?

It was dangerous to admit that she wished she wasn't. That perhaps some small part of her didn't want to be a nothing, a nobody, anymore.

A sedan with tinted windows zoomed by on the street, making a hard turn right as the wailing of sirens came screeching after it. Billie slumped even further on the bench, the coolness of the bottle suddenly magnified on her too-thin fingertips.

Who was she kidding? She was just a pebble. A pebble on the mountain that was Brookville—no, the world. Billie Crawford was nothing, and never would be anything. There was no point in dreaming, or thinking, or believing. She was just as scummy as the rest of them, too lost for fairytales.

Billie pushed off from the bench, the dirty pavement of the sidewalk swaying underneath her feet as she staggered forward. She crossed the street without a care in the world, an identical sedan nearly clipping her as it turned. The enraged shouts of the driver were fuzzy in her ears, the ringing of booze much louder in her head. When she passed the sniffling child, she stalled.