Project: Alice

Down the Rabbit Hole,

"I am not Alice" I sometimes feel the need to get the words tattooed in bold letters on my forehead, maybe that would finally get the message across, maybe then they'd stop comparing me to her, maybe then things wouldn't have become what they are. I have been in my sister's shadow from the day I was born, Alice was always prettier, always smarter, always first, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone that she was the first to die, too. They found her in the early spring when the snow melted, they said she'd slipped and hit her head, frozen before anyone knew she'd snuck out of her room, It's been three years already, and as much as I miss her and try to be like her, I'm in no rush to replace her the way mother wants, being Alice is too much work, who wants to be perfect? Who wants to be clever and popular and athletic? And yet I find myself trying harder every time she's mentioned, practice practice practice, working to be like someone I don't want to be, maybe one day I'd catch up to her, my pretty, perky, perfect older sister. Maybe one day I would stand somewhere other than the shadow of a corpse, yet somehow even that was an impossible hurdle for the one left behind. All I would ever be, it seemed, was Another Alice, a spare. Sometimes, on rare days, it wasn't a completely terrible thing to be, If someone asks me what I'll do with my life, I don't have to hesitate, everything is plotted out in front of me, at age sixteen, I know exactly where my life is going and what I'll be, I'll pick up her medical science degree, I'll graduate with honours, become a doctor of some kind and settle down into a completely average life. But these days of clarity are becoming few and far between, because perfect isn't enough, I can't stumble, or fail a test, or have an off day or else the barrage will start again "why can't you put a little more effort in, Alice wouldn't have failed that test, Alice wouldn't have done this or said that, why can't you be more like Alice? Alice! Alice! Alice!" until I pick up my feet, It's completely exhausting and I have no idea how much of me is me or just another piece of Alice, and I'm left wondering Is the approval of others worth this much?'

Staring listlessly at the page Elinor muttered "Those left behind, those left- gods that's pretentious" She looked down at the page with a grimace before tearing it out of her notebook and crumpling it up, tossing it from her desk carelessly, letting it land amongst the other discarded pages, a puddle of white, blue and red as she tried to put off her essay another minute, another hour, another day, anything to not have to talk to Ms Aramina Bastos, her tutor. Aramina wasn't an unpleasant woman, but she wanted full focus at all times, and that didn't suit her student at all. Letting her breath whistle between her teeth quietly, 'bunny teeth' alice had always called them, she threw down her pen and turned away from her desk, freezing with her eyes on the window.

She shouldn't have been surprised that there was a fat white rabbit at her window, it's brown tipped ears twitching as it stared piercingly back at her, It took her far longer than it should have to realise why the rabbit's presence made her uneasy, it wasn't until she'd crammed all her papers into her satchel and stepped out into the hallway that she realised, the rabbit had been sitting on the snow banked window sill of the third floor of an old victorian house that served as her boarding school, there was no possible way that a rabbit that fat could have climbed all those pillars and sconces to get to her classroom window, much less done it quietly. Shoes slipping on the polished floorboards, she sprinted back to the room, the rabbit wasn't there anymore, there weren't even footprints or break in the snow on the sill, it was as if the rabbit had never been there to begin with. Mind reeling and back aching from sitting so long, she plodded back down the silent hallway to her dorm, almost everyone else had gone home for the few weeks of winter break, but she would really rather not, especially if she was losing her mind, that would not go over well with her mother. She decided that the rabbit had been a hallucination and ducked her head. reaching her dorm, she nudged the door open with her foot, the latch had been broken all semester, and dumped her satchel as soon as she could and threw herself onto the worn down mattress with a heavy sigh. The room was filled with white light, pink and blue dresses and the air smelled of strawberries and jasmine, her favourite perfume, the whole room had entirely the wrong atmosphere for her current mood and she couldn't do a thing about it.

Elinor didn't even get to stay there and mope for long, staring at the crack on the third board from the door, being stifled by the quiet air. She quickly grew frustrated that moping in a flowery, well lit room wasn't working at all. She had to get up after only twenty minutes because she still had an essay to avoid and staying inside where Aramina patrolled wasn't going to work well, and it wasn't snowing anymore. She glared at her satchel, the half drafted essay poking out of the top, before rolling awkwardly off the bed and pulling her jacket on, her logic was simple, if her problems were all inside at the moment, then she should be outside. The school was situated exactly in the middle of nothing, the nearest town was nearly two hours away, and the nearest farm was a forty minute walk straight across fields that, while now glazed in muddy snow, usually held wheat or corn too tall to wade through. On top of the remarkable isolation of the school, nothing much lived in the area, there was enough small wildlife that seeing a rabbit wasn't a life changing event, but a fire a few years ago had left the ground covered in infertile ditches and furrows, so nothing much, besides a gloomy boarding school and a struggling farm, could sustain an existence, it left Elinor's world practically silent.

She pulled her muffler tighter around her and walked further from the school walls, feet sinking into the snow, her socks and shoes already soaked through as she let her mind wander to the far corners of awareness, so it wasn't surprising that she almost missed the fat rabbit again, it was watching her from a ridge of snow, its nose twitching as it's glittering, beady eyes followed her, her eyes skimmed over it for a minute before she stopped and turned, pushing a new handful of the icy slush into her shoes in the process, and facing it. It stared at her, she stared at it, it was possibly the biggest rabbit she'd ever seen, with dark eyes and a single patch of brown on its head. She was still staring at the rabbit when it started towards her, warily, but notably odd, since rabbits would usually run the other way when encountering a person. It got nearer and she could now see the thin, sharp teeth in it's mouth, clicking quietly in the otherwise silent snow, definitely an unusually large rabbit, she wondered if it was possibly big enough to knock her over if it hit her legs, she opted not to find out and turned to walk away, it followed her. She got a little way before it moved ahead and turned to stare her down, which was just a little too odd for Elinor's taste so she turned again and walked in another direction, away from the school, and every time she turned around it was still a few steps behinds her, she was reminded of her teacher, always hovering but never directly interfering.

Elinor ended up walking for almost ten minutes straight, her shoes full of mud and snow, shivering and trying to pull her cardigan tighter around herself, she hadn't intended to be out so long, or so close to evening, and thus hadn't brought a reasonable jacket with her, she cursed quietly and glanced back at the rabbit, it was sitting perfectly still a few metres behind her "what," she turned to face it "finally got bored of chasing me? Gonna let me go back now?" she rested her hands on her hips and stared at it, she lifted her foot to start trudging back and the Rabbit dashed forward, slamming head first into her other leg, if it had been a normal rabbit she might have been okay, but this bulky, dog-sized rabbit sent her skittering, her feet skidding ineffectively across snow until she fell backwards, straight into one of the many abandoned rabbit holes in the field, she shrieked as her head struck the frozen dirt and she vaguely wondered to herself if they'd find her like they had Alice, and then she let herself be swept up in the falling sensation.