Ch 5 - New me

I think that day was quite significant, but I choose to pretend it's not because that was the day that man died.

Moving to a new place actually made me feel better and more at ease. I felt innocent and happy, like when I was a kid.

To anyone who came across me, I was cute and innocent, but I knew what I was capable of.

I think I loved looking vulnerable; it allowed me to have a sense of superiority, like I knew what the other person was up to and all that.

I was a year behind in school, so I had to take a couple of private classes with the teacher my mother hired. I was quite smart, and I wondered why God would create such a perfect psychopath like me. But when I look back, my life isn't perfect—still.

We were too poor to afford an iPad, probably because that stupid man kept gambling the money away.

Tsk, very useless man.

So I entered a school math competition and won, which was how I got my first gadget ever. My phone was a gift from one of my crushes.

Now that I think about it, I probably should have dated one of my many crushes, but I think they would have just used me to brag or gamble, like that man did.

He almost gambled his newborn child away one time.

I was not even surprised.

Of course, my mother covered up for him, and after the cops left, he hit her so hard that the marks on her body were purple.

I think, yes, living in a new country might be healing, but I am still pretty much living in the past.

After I managed to get double-promoted because of my exam scores, I was back in the grade I would have originally been in before I took time off school. It was a very crazy day when they announced my scores and what my reward was.

I guess my hard work paid off.

I gained fans from my new classmates even before we resumed. I was the first "beauty with brains" they had met, so they were curious. They couldn't find any social media accounts, but they did find out about my dirty past, which I realised one time when I was having period cramps in the nurse's office.

I heard, "As if she hasn't gone through hell enough, she has cramps too," and then a reply, "I know, right? Poor thing."

No wonder the whole class had been extremely nice to me since the year began.

I'll continue to pretend not to know that they know.

I didn't really know how to make friends and was horrible at it, but eventually, three people stuck around for long, and we ended up being close.

Tiana, Harry, and Cornelius.

They were the ones who helped me gain a sense of freedom, and I was happy to have met them.

We would have sleepovers, mostly around Cornelius' place because his house was huge—it was practically a mansion. His family was rich, and I still wonder why he was friends with me in the first place. It was really fun.

One fateful Wednesday, we were all at school when we saw Cornelius trying to drag a girl back.

However, he did very little to stop her because she seemed to not take no for an answer.

Tiana and I were talking about shopping at thrift stores for the weekend. To be honest, my school was a private school, and many children there were from rich homes. I was just an average girl from a family that was managing to survive.

I got in because the owner of the school was my mom's best friend, and he wanted to lessen the burden. But to be honest, I had already applied for the scholarship and had gotten in before he suggested that. It made Uncle Bob more proud of me.

Uncle Bob was what I called him because of how I knew him, but everyone else knew him as Mr. Crown.

Great Crown High School—that was the name of my school. Uncle Bob also had different preschools and kindergartens scattered everywhere, and it makes me wonder sometimes why my mother chose to marry that idiot.

Well, they say love is blind.

Yes, it obviously was.