The Classix

(2ND DRAFT) PREFACE

Note: Keep reading, even if you think you've read it before. It changes. We'll review it all afterward.

Okay. Onward.

EMERAY

When I was younger, and unaware of the world's cruel capabilities, I never thought I'd get used to being hated. Hate is never something you anticipate having to consistently face in your everyday life. It's not something vitally present in your thoughts when you're learning how to walk, to talk, to eat without someone there holding the spoon to your lips. Hate isn't something you hope for when you're walking into class on your first ever day of school.

When you're young, really young, all you know is the color of your parents' eyes when they look at you, and the wallpaper in your room, and the glint of your spit on chewed-up train sets. You only see hate in unpleasant little glimpses. Slight arguments. Tiny disagreements. A scolding or two.

But sooner or later it hits. Hate is a most unwelcome gift on the birthday you never really wanted nor asked for. The thing is, you don't always remember the first day you really knew somebody hated you. We as humans tend to block it out of our minds or let time take it away for us. Regardless, every year that fatal day passes you by, as casual as the notions that slip from your memory when you fall asleep at night. It is a birthday nobody celebrates, the day you first were hated.

It exists nonetheless.

Somewhere in my first or second year of attending school, I started believing that my real birthday and this awful one had likely both come on the same day, within the same establishing moment. The doctors and nurses must've hated me the moment I came into existence––the moment they saw my eyes and realized they were supposed to be brown, not that unnatural, icy blue. My family, despite their best efforts to hide it, must've hated me too as I grew from an infant and my completely incorrect dark hair began to grow in with me. There I was––something I shouldn't have been. Something to be hated.

They should've told me right then, before I went to school, instead of patching up some kindness to me when they changed my diapers. Some emotions are better being first displayed in a safer setting than out in the big bad world, and hatred is definitely one of them. Maybe if I'd been better prepared, I would've had a better response to the hatred I received almost immediately when I stepped out into the world.

A younger Carstan van Horne waited no time to show me his own hatred. In fact, I'm almost positive his first words to me were, "Freak, I hate you," without a second's hesitation. And the moment we were dismissed to recess he took his gang of littler boys and he had them each take a turn pushing me into the wood chips on the playground. All the while he stood by, watching and repeating again and again that I was an abomination. I was crying and bleeding and asking him over and over, "What is an abomination?" But he wouldn't tell me. He just shook his head at my whimpering and told me it was better I didn't know what I was, just like everyone else didn't.

I would've liked to have known hate before Carstan van Horne hated me. Maybe I would've been stronger. Maybe I would've handled it better.

But nobody told me, flat-out, until he did. And every single day since then he put it in his schedule––blocked off a couple minutes in even the busiest of afternoons to showcase this immense hatred he had for me in any convenient way he could find.

It happened so frequently that I became used to it. I had to get used to it. Soon enough I expected hatred from everyone I met, because they all showed that same shocked face, and those same curt responses, and that same pressing thing they needed to get to that made them have to walk away from me so quickly. I grew to presume a person hated me by default, and that this presumption would never waver for a moment, no matter what I did or how kind I was to them. There was no need for me to try to make someone like me, because they'd never want to be seen with the different girl. My own siblings didn't even want to be seen with me––how could I expect that from somebody who wasn't so unfortunate as to share my last name?