A Smile to Hide (CYOA/WWYFF)

Chapter 1

    You don’t know why you hang out with Jessica and Markus.  Maybe it’s because you’ve known them since elementary school, or maybe it’s because you have some things in common.  Either way, you don’t like the subject that is currently being talked about: monsters.

    “They are everywhere!”  Jessica complains, flipping her long wavy brown hair out of her ivy green eyes.  “I swear my new neighbor is a witch!”  She doesn’t even look at either you or Markus, but is instead focusing on her compact mirror counting her freckles that are scattered over her cheeks and over the bridge of her nose.  She hates them, often complaining about them, and wishing they would vanish from her skin, but she still doesn’t realize that it was her freckles that made her noticeable.

    Markus leans in and asks, “How so?”  He doesn’t need to ask to convey that he wants to hear the details.  His dark brown eyes beg for him, showing his eagerness for the conversation to continue.  You think you can feel the tingles coming off of his dark skin.  He tucks one of his dreadlocks over his head only for it to fall back over his face between his eyes.  He thanks Jessica when she hands him a spare dark brown barrette.

    Jessica finally closes her mirror with a snap and looks at you and Markus.  “First of all, she wears all black, and when she was moving in her furniture, they were all creepy macabre pieces.  I swear!  There were cat statues, actual human skulls and old trunks being hauled in.  They were big enough to hide bodies.” 

    You discreetly roll your eyes at the stupidity of the assumptions.  You had actually greeted her ‘witch’ neighbor on Saturday night and helped her with unpacking some of the boxes, trying to be a friendly member of the community.  Jessica must have been at a slumber party that night or else you would have been scorned by Jessica.  Poor Mrs. Henson.  She had just lost her husband and was still in mourning.  All the trunks were filled with her late husband’s things, and the old furniture was going to be sold to an antique store.  The human skulls were ancient that her husband had collected when he was an archeologist.  As for the cat statues, she just loved them.  They were her hobby.  As far as you can tell, after seeing many crosses, St. Mary statues, and multiple versions of the holy bible in the boxes, she seems like a strong Roman Catholic woman.

    If Jessica and Markus are talking about anything else, they are civil, like actual human beings with compassion, but when ‘monsters,’ ‘creatures of the night,’ or ‘devils in disguise’ are brought up, they turn into a couple of bigot idiots.  You don’t know if being in a Christian private school has anything to do with their attitudes, but either way, they turn you off so easily that it makes you question if they are your friends or not.  Maybe you are insane, or the sanest person alive, but you’re not sure which.

    They aren’t the only people who don’t like the thought of living together with different beings.  Other students, parents, teachers, almost everyone you know disliked them, but the person who you know hated them most is Father Gordon; the principal and the head priest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  As if the name of the city isn’t enough, witches, elves, faeries, dwarves and all other creatures are looked down upon; however actually chasing them out would be considered racist, prejudiced, hateful, and illegal.

    Ever since the Industrial Revolution, when the homes of faeries in the forests, the mines of dwarves in the mountains, and everything that human thought was just mythology, was uncovered to be reality.  People were scared, and it did become a witch hunt, so the creatures fought back.  While they had mystics and magic, along with their own unique abilities, humans had advanced firepower and manpower.  After a century, the ’creatures’ and the humans called a truce, and decided to try and leave each other alone.  In the 1890s, both sides started to cautiously interact with each other and live like friendly neighbors that you barely know.  In the mid 1930s, the Psychic Exams were created when psychic abilities started to suddenly pop up in humans.  Most people thought it was because they were a hybrid of one of the creatures, but even if that was debunked as myth, because it turns out that everyone is a little psychic, and it was more of a mass paranoia at the time, a lot of people still think it’s a fact being covered up by the government who are being controlled by witches and demons.  The Psychic Exams have been improved, and are still used to identify people with abnormal abilities and take them to a facility to make sure they aren’t dangerous.  You don’t know what happens at the ‘facility,’ but none of the rumors were good, and rumors are all people have to go on.