Kill For You

One - Family History

>< kill for you ><

f a m i l y ... h i s t o r y

Note: Unedited

My family is interesting, as everybody (a.k.a. my mother and father) says. Actually, not my family on my father's side. In fact, that side is probably the most typical family of relatives a seventeen year old girl could have. Really, it's quite annoying.

My name is Natalia Kreen. I am fifteen years old. I live in an apartment in the city of Manhatten with my three sisters: Molly, Cecelia and Lily. My mother and father work day jobs at the city center and I look after my siblings, who are all under twelve. I only see my fathers grandparent at Christmas, when we are forced to drive for three hours all of us in one car to visit their cattle farm and receive a knitted sweater with a crooked Christmas tree emboided on the front. My mother loves to cook but father can't even put on toast. I tend to get very carsick and always -- and I mean always -- throw up on the way to a place more than ten minutes away. Too graphic? OK. Let's get away from that topic.

I don't really know how to describe my mother's family. I understand that if I start from the very beginning and write until the very end it will get really quite boring and very few people would be able to hang on until the good stuff (unsually about the beginning of the end). So I'm just going to outline my mother's life at home. Just the important details.

My mother grew up in and apartment block too. She had four sisters and nine brothers. They all lived in one apartment with their mother Scarlett. At midnight of their sixteenth birthday, each child would leave the house and never come back. My mother says that she has never come across any of her brothers and sisters since they were sixteen, but somehow all of us know she's lying,

One night, my mother woke up at ten o'clock. She thought she must have been too nervous to sleep. It was two hours until midnight. Two hours until her older sister, Tasha -- who had always been her favourite sister -- would leave. She got out of bed and went into her sister's room. But she didn't find Tasha awake, as she had expected. She saw Nick. He was fourteen at the time, and my mother was ten. Nick was lying in bed, a dim booklight on. He was lying on his stomach with his back to her, reading something that she couldn't see.

She lay down beside him, and he flinched, slippping the paper underneath his pillow. The next day, my mother attempted to sneak into his room and read it. She couldn't. A month later, Nick had never come home from school. Scarlette presumed him dead, but mother knew that whatever was written on that paper had driven Nick to run away from home. And she swore to herself then, that she would find out what was so wrong, and investigate.