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003. Dead Girl Walking
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AT THE TENDER AGE OF SEVEN, Mara despised dresses. Utterly hated them. There was no actual reason, yet she refused to wear anything like it. No skirts. No dresses. Only bright green leggings and sparkly skinny jeans.
She was a true fashion icon, really.
Back then, she thought the black dress on her bed was her father's first personal attack. She remembered looking at the charcoal piece of clothing on top of her pink My Little Pony bedding. It seemed quite poetic at the time, representing this huge dark void in the middle of her colourful life.
Her mother was gone, erased from Mara's future, forever stuck in the memories of her past.
She thought her father's broken heart led him to let out his anger on her, in the form of a dress — a black dress with a small, embroidered daisy on the front.
It never even occurred to her that her father simply didn't know of the hate she felt for anything that wasn't a pair of pants.
He picked the dress because her mother loved daisies and bought it a week before.
Because none of her parents knew of her interests.
Because both her parents deemed their work to be more important than their child.
She wore the black dress anyway.
As they buried her mother, Mara wore her parents' ideas. And as more time passed, those ideas sculpted her being. She had lost herself before figuring out her identity, and now, Mara feared she'd never know who she truly was.
"I'm hungry," Elsie announced, stuffing the sheets of paper back into her navy bag. She turned to Mara."Are you hungry?"
For a second, the question played on repeat in Mara's mind.
Are you hungry? Are you hungry? Are you hungry?
Amara Parish had been starving for nine years since the day she put on the black dress. She had turned the dish of truths away, remaining undefined rather than digging herself a spot next to her mother.
She chose to please her father in fear of another hit, an additional kick.
But Mara put an end to it two days ago.
Adjusting each and every detail about herself, so he'd be happy, reshaping her soul into whatever he thought was his daughter, had ended when she left Hancock Park's gated community.
