Chapter 1 Agatha

Agatha

She refused to look at anyone who passed in front or behind her.  She refused to look at the man who sat down beside her.

"What's a pretty girl like you doing all alone?"  he said with a sickening smirk and cocked head.

She ignored him.

"What the matter? Cat's got your tongue?"

She said nothing.

The man slid closer to her and put his arm across the top of the bench.  His filthy smell of cologne stunk up the air.

"You know I have been looking for a new secretary."

As he finished his sentence, she slowly turned and looked at him.

"Wow, what beautiful eyes you have."  he said, acting as though he were too irresistible for words.

In a low controlled voice she said, "Get away from me before I gut you like a fish and drape your insides around your neck like a tie and stuff your liver in your mouth... old man."  Insanity burned out of her eyes with such force; the man stumbled up and ran like a scared child.

Her name was Agatha.  She was named this because her mother told her all she did was cause agony in her life.

Aggi got home late, so she became invisible as she walked in.  She did not know her parents could see her.  They told her she could turn invisible since she was a kid.  They thought it was funny.  Aggi knew nothing else.  They had kept her isolated.  She was their experiment to see what they could get away with.  It was purely for their own entertainment.

Aggi lived in a quiet, negative world.  Either her parents didn't talk to her, or they were telling her how she did something wrong or was just bad.

Her parents kept pretty pictures ripped out from fashion magazines taped up and down the hallway to Aggi's room.  They told her she was ugly because she was a bad person.  When she started being good she would turn pretty.  Whenever Aggi got the courage up she would look into the mirror to see if she had changed.

Most people would say she's a beautiful girl.  Her baby fine soft blond hair wisps about her shoulders.  She is average height and very slim like a runway model.  She has a perfect complexion, flawless in fact.  Her eyes stood out the most, crystal blue eyes that could change in an instant from penetrating to vacant.  Girls are jealous and boys want her.  When she sees herself in a mirror, she sees a warped monster as a reflection.

Aggi did all the chores in the house.  Her parents were pigs.  They dropped their garbage wherever they were at the time.  Her parents loved American cheese wrapped slices.  The clear cellophane was everywhere along with her father's contact lens.  He would take them out and just drop them where he stood.  Sometimes he thought it was funny to throw used ones on her.

Her parents never cleaned.  They said their time was worth too much to do it.  The house was either disgusting or Aggi had cleaned it.  She could not stand mess.  It made her mind foggy, and she couldn't think.  Her parents had her bury most of the trash in the yard; they said it was "weed block".  Aggi put anything else in black garbage bags and slid it under various neighbor's hedges at night.

She cleaned up every night before she went to bed.  She was always so tired.  She set her alarm for 11:50 p.m.  She then placed it beside her pillow so she would not bother her parents. She did this ritual every night of her life.

When Aggi was little, her mother told her to stop crying or at midnight her face would freeze like that forever.  To prove it to her they showed her deformed pictures of people and pointed out deformed people on the street.  They said they froze like that.  Her parents tapped these pictures up and down the walls of the hallway leading up to her room.

When the alarm went off, she would position herself without expression, and hope she did not sneeze.  After midnight, she would set her alarm for school.

Aggi's world was so ugly at times.  She felt divided into two.  The world had so much to offer and could be so beautiful, yet horror was constantly shoved into her face.

"We are donating your body to science, you know... we own you until you are eighteen." her mom said with her head tilted down and eyes peering from the top of her head.  

"If we piece you out, we should make a pretty penny."  After a few moments of silence, her parents exploded with laughter and started poking at each other like kids in grade school.

Aggi said nothing.

The morning after they told her about donating her body, there were pictures taped up of cadavers in various stages of dissection.  They were very disturbing.  Some of the pictures took a minute to understand.  The head sitting in a tin-cooking pan with the face skin lifted and folded over on itself was one of those.  Another was the skin of an old man's face resting on a stainless steel counter.  It looked like a rubbery Halloween mask.  Her parents wrote messages on paper and tapped them beside the photos.  One scribbled message said, "I'm coming to get you!" in red ink.

Aggi watched the families on T.V. and wished for a life like that.  Her favorite show was the Brady Bunch reruns.  They were perfect.  Especially their scrumptious dinners they had.  They all sat together and passed around heaping platters of food.  She loved the way their forks tinked on the plates.  She wanted a family like that.

She would sneak out at night so she could walk the streets peeking from a distance into lit windows, imagining the happy life the people had in there.  Especially when it was a cool crisp night, and the smell of logs burning in the fireplace swept through the night air.  She imagined people huddled around the fireplace, laughing and playing games.  Even not speaking at all, just content, safe and loved.

Aggi's heart was heavy.  She wanted someone to love and to be loved back.  She created her own family.  Aggi looked through old Sears and Penny's store catalogs.  She found pictures of kids who she wished were her older brothers and sisters.  They became real to her.  So no one would find her paper family, she folded them into origami designs.  She kept them on her nightstand.  They were her secret family.

Her mom would sometimes come into Aggi's room just to knock one over and watch Aggi squirm as she crushed it under her foot.  Her mom knew they were important to her, she just didn't know why.  As it would fall to the floor, Aggi would hold her breath.  Please be O.K. ... please be O.K.  As her mom would grind it into the floor, Aggi would cover her ears to muffle the screams she heard from her origami person.  She would close her eyes hard and say nothing.

"You are so weird, what did I ever do to deserve you?"  Her mother blurted, "Why didn't I just abort you?  I tries you know, I stuck soap up me to wash you out but you wouldn't die."

No matter how many times she heard this, it still hurt.

As her mother left the room you could hear her whine "What am I being punished for?"

Aggi gave herself a few moments to feel sad, then pushed it away.  She had work to do. Aggi got one of her little coffins she made out of old cereal boxes and buried her friend outside. It started to rain.  She tilted her head back to let the rain roll down her face.  It mixed with the tears.  She memorized the moment.