Disclaimer: This story comes from my own mind. Any resemblances to any other characters, alive or dead, or anything, is coincidental. I wrote it, so please don’t steal it. K Thanks!

A/N: My first ever fiction, at least written for this site. Please please please R&R! I need to know if I’m really bad! Thank you! Breaks will be xxxxxx.

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I’m five years old. The bus turns the corner at the end of the street and starts lumbering toward us. All the others start jumping up and down, and their mother’s tell them with a smile to settle down. I just tighten my grip on my own mother’s hand.

This should be the other way around. I should be jumping for joy while my mother bites back tears. I, however, am the one on the verge of losing it. And my mother can tell. Mom gets down on one knee and tosses one of my braided pigtails behind my shoulder.

I’m wearing my favorite dress-the one that’s blue with the red strawberries on it. Before we left the house, Mom told me I looked as cute as a button. I was nervous then, too. Last night I wasn’t quite as scared. But now…now I’m not sure I want to leave my Mommy.

“Hey, little girl.” Mom whispers in my ear, and a tear slips down my chubby cheek. “You are going to be just fine, Emily.”

I shake my head instinctively. “How do you know?” I ask.

“I just do. You’re going to go to kindergarten and it’s going to be fun, and you’re going to want to stay there and never leave, I promise.”

“But how do you know?” I ask in that whiny, annoying, five year old voice. But Mom never gets annoyed. She always just smiles and works everything out. She knows exactly how to deal with me when I’m being…well, when I’m being five.

“I know. Trust me.” The bus pulls up, and Mom watches as the other mothers load their children on with tears in their eyes and biting their lips. “I love you, Ems. Have a great first day of kindergarten.”

I nod and fearfully walk towards the bus. I climb in and the driver smiles happily at me. I take the first seat on the right side of the bus, so I can get a look at Mom. She’s smiling and waving, like the rest of the Mommy’s and Daddy’s. My Daddy’s not here because he had to work.

I wave half-heartedly and sink into my seat.

Suddenly, I hear a BANG!

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Emily Walsh shot out of her sleep at the sound of the bang. She’d been dreaming again, of the last time she saw her mother. Her mother had meant everything to her. But, she was gone now.

She had put a bullet through her head that first day Emily went to kindergarten. No one knew why. Claire Walsh had been such a happy woman, or so everyone thought.

Emily thought of the funeral, where everyone had said, “I’m so sorry, Alex,” to Emily’s father, and had patted little Em on the head. Then later, when she went to get a cookie from the table of food upstairs, she’d heard two women discussing it.

“It’s disgusting to think of a woman doing something like that to herself! Poor Emily and Alex. You know, her little girl’s only about five or six. She just started kindergarten the day it happened. She should’ve been grateful she even had a family, and she took it all away. How on earth are they going to function? I tell you, if I could talk to Claire right now, I’d give her a piece of my mind! Ripping apart her family like that…disgusting, it is, just disgusting…”

Emily’s ornery side had kicked in and she’d given the woman a swift kick in the shins, before throwing her five year old self down on the floor and screaming. Her father had come running upstairs and scooped her up, soothing her with whispers in her ears and shooting dirty looks at the woman who was rubbing her sore shin.

Their relationship had been different ever since Emily came home from school, literally leaping off the bus to tell her mother of her wonderful day. Her neighbor, Mrs. Walters, had been standing in her living room when she came home, and her father had seen Emily, and hugged her, and cried into her shoulder.

“Daddy, where’s Mommy?” He just shook his head. “Daddy, when is Mommy coming home?” And the second time he shook his head, Emily knew the answer was never.

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A/N: Let me know what you think!! It will get better in later chapters, I promise.