MUERTA VIVIENTE | JENLISA

SEVEN

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A girl in an aquarium.

She wouldn't share her lip gloss and so her friends said she couldn't walk with them.

She got mad and went off to look at the penguins, which weren't dolphins but looked pretty, like in the movies she'd seen with her mother and father. Her lips tasted like cream soda, but she actually didn't like it all that much (it was the only flavor left and her mother had agreed to buy her lip gloss once, just this once, and she knew she had to take what she could get) and she missed her friends.

Plus the penguins got boring fast. They just stood around looking like they knew they weren't in a real home. Looking like they knew their lives were just a lie.

A woman tapped her shoulder and told her she needed to go find her class, that they were watching a movie.

"It's already started," she said. "You better hurry up."

"Oh," the girl said. "Where?"

"The movie theater."

The girl looked at her blankly. She didn't know where that was. They'd been given maps when they came in, but she and her friends hadn't looked at them. They were bright red with stupid baby-looking arrows drawn on them to show where you were when you got the map. Dumb.  Like they didn't know where they were?

They balled them up and threw them away. Then she wouldn't loan them her lip gloss.

Then she was alone.

The woman sighed. "Fine, I'll show you. Come with me."

The girl knew she wasn't supposed to go anywhere with strangers, but the woman had on a blue shirt like everyone who worked at the aquarium, and she was crabby like the lady who'd told them welcome and to be quiet in the same sentence. She was just an annoying, boring grown-up, not like the strangers she was warned about, who spoke sweetly creepy, things like oh little girl, come sit on my lap, or offered rides or candy or secrets.

The woman took her outside, because her class was in the other building, the new one. She'd seen it as she came in, and had wondered why they'd put in a movie theater but not dolphins.

Before they went outside, before they even left the penguins (who were still just standing there, doing nothing, like they were watching them), she gave her a baseball cap.

"Everyone got one," she said. "Yours is the only one left, though, so it's too big. Better tuck your hair up under it. Maybe that way it'll stay on."

So the girl mashed her hair up under the hat so the hat wouldn't fall off and went outside. When she did, the woman stayed behind to say something to the other woman at the door. Grown-ups and all their boring talk.