A/N: This is the prologue to my novel titled: “Toxicity.” I encourage all readers to go to my profile and read the character descriptions before reading the first chapter, however, I think you’re safe to read the prologue.

Toxicity Prologue: Change.

I never thought that my life would ever change, I always thought it’d be the same old, same old, my life has always been the same, even since I was 13 years of age, that was the year my father was killed while at work, if that’s what you can call it. Before that I lived completely and perfectly unaware of what my father was doing on those Dark nights, four times a week, at those ungodly hours in the night and early morning, isn’t it funny that I never found it suspicious it’s as if everyone else knew but my mother and I.

We were always fairly well off, my medication was always paid for, and I was always looked after, and I was able to devote my life to my schooling and my passions for reading and writing, I was always and avid reader, by grade 6, I was reading at a senior high level, and I had read various Shakespear plays and many novels. Writing was always a passion I’ve had, well, ever since we had to write our own children’s story in grade 5, and ever since I’ve always been writing, I’ve neglected what little social life I had to write, and sometimes I would be so engrossed with a piece I would fall weeks behind in school, but somehow, I would always manage to pass my classes, and with one of the highest marks in the class, that was something I never understood until I turned 16, and one of my high school teachers told me that I must me an eidetic learner.

But, at age 13 I learned the family secret, the truth about my father. The man I called dad, the one who kept food on the table, clothes on my back, and kept a roof over the heads of my mother and I, and the man who looked after my mother, and took care of her before almost everything else, that man was a drug dealer. Scum on the earth he made a living by ruining marriages, killing people, messing people up and all in all ruining peoples lives, to think on the night of his death, I remember pleading with him to stay home, with mum and I, because she was having a particularly horrible day, but he told me he has important work to do, I then begged him to take me with him because I didn’t want to be left alone with my mother, how selfish of me. Of course he told me that I couldn’t come because it was to dangerous for a boy my age, and that maybe he’d take me when I was older, what a sickening thought. And those words, they were the last ones he ever uttered to me, words that haunt me, words promising that he would make me into a monster. At the time I thought he was a police officer, or a private investigator but never in my wildest dreams, did I expect him to be a filthy drug dealer. I mean we had a great life, we were the typical suburban family, then again, you know that they say about families in the suburbs.

That was the night he never came home, usually I would wake up when I heard the car pull into the driveway or when the door slammed shut, but it never did that night. And when I woke up in the morning my mother was missing to, normally I would wake up in the morning to the television blaring the local news, when I woke up the house was silent and still, as if I was the only one that ever did and ever will exist. How funny it is when I look back I thought my parents had abandoned me, left me there alone and moved to another state to start a new family and have a daughter, mum always wanted a daughter, after deciding that they must have abandoned my I went to my room and sat in the middle of the floor holding a plush penguin I hadn’t held in years. I didn’t cry though, I sat there staring off into space for what felt like and probably was hours, I don’t think I moved a fraction of an inch until my mother and her sister snapped me out of my trance by slamming the door, when I went down to greet them, or rather see if it was someone coming to take me to an orphanage, I was greeted by my mother and aunt in tears. My mother barely managed to utter the words: “Your father’s gone.” Before she broke down again, I must have gone into shock because all I remember after those words was thinking: ‘Where did he go to?’ After that weeks flew by in a haze, weeks turned to months, and months evolved into years, and the next thing I remember is that two and a half years had passed by and my mothers mental health was declining, and we were barely scraping by.

That is until the son of a former family friend stepped in and started to help out, he was only three years my senior but with a stable job and a need to step up and take responsibility and help out, it was a huge relief, and it allowed me to continue my schooling normally, since before he came into our lives I was missing days and days of school of course this was when everything started to rapidly change, and as I got older I started to develop like most teens do, but I found myself growing up all wrong, I found myself looking more feminine then manly, I should have had broad shoulders, and a distinct strong chiseled jaw, but I must have taken after my mother, because instead of looking like any 16 year old boy did, I looked like a 16 year old girl, I’m short, lith, and I have a soft girly face, and throughout the years with me being so busy, I stopped maintaining my clean short haircut and it’s grown out long red and curly, and it falls past the small of my back. Also my eyes are two different colours, they’re both blue/green but the left is more green and the right is more blue, that’s because I have Heterochromia Iridium.1

As I developed into this feminine character, I started to get a lot of attention from the same sex, come age 16, I can honestly say I no longer has any attraction to the opposite sex, like I should have, I had by then completely come to terms with my homosexuality. And then it happened, Kael the son of the former family friend, asked me the one question that would further change my life, he asked me if I would be his boyfriend, his lover, and being the just out of the closet 16 year old boy I was, I more then happily said yes, seeing as I had been attracted to Kael for months, I never would have thought he would like me, in that way, and I had always dreamed of the day he would sweep me off my feet and treat me like a princess. However, fairy tales with real people never end that way.

Six months later I started to write my online novel titled: “Frostbite.” It started off innocently as a small online novel I was writing to simply vent my emotions, and it fast became a world famous novel that has won over 15 awards from many online literary award sites, and I am constantly finding fan fictions, and fan art for ‘frostbite’ and on top of all of that, there’s a fan site with over 86 thousand online members worldwide, and growing rapidly. With each update comes more hits then the update before it, and why? Because frostbite is the story of a musician who’s struggling with his life. The main character who performs under the alias: S.N is a slow motion train wreck, he struggles with everything from family issues to drug abuse, and I guess that’s what draws the reader in, and this piece of fiction has become my most recognized piece and one of the online novel circuits most praised and criticized piece of work, with many critics throwing me under the bus because of my age, saying that there is no possible way I could write such a complex piece and that I must have translated the story from another language. And many of my fans think I base my character off myself, and therefore, I try to end frostbite and move onto a new work of fiction, but I never can. I’m not sure if it’s the fan base and all of their admiration and comments, or if it’s the need to prove to the critics that this is my story, but either way something tells me that I’ll never move on, even if my reasons for writing frostbite are in my past.

My hopes for this new city, they’re quite simple. I hope to restart my life here, I’ve just moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Boston, Massachusetts, we moved here because we needed a change both my mother and myself. So now I am faced with a new challenge, I have to finish my last year of school and look after my mother, and make sure she goes to her meetings, her doctors appointments, and make sure that she doesn’t start to abuse her medication again, and on top of having to do all of that, I have to do it all alone, even at age 18 it’s difficult not having the help of my aunt and grandmother, and I’m sure by now there are a million different rumors about me and my late arrival to school. Perhaps I’ll be the kid everyone ignores because of the rumors. Maybe my hopes of people leaving me alone occurs, I just want to be left alone to my thoughts and to do my own thing and of course look after my mother, also looking for a job is a must, and it’ll probably be hard to find an employer willing to hire me since I’ve never had a job before, and I have no job experience, but I am determined to get one since I have my doubts thatt the welfare money will pay for my mothers medication, for the apartment, the bills, and in addition to that the groceries. It’s been hard for us to live this way, we went from living well and having extra money, no matter how dirty that money was, to just scraping by, and stretching money further then it can go. But somehow we manage and we’ve managed with only a little bit debt, which I would love to get paid off but it’s not like I could make money writing. My writing is hardly worth being on a piece of paper, and sometimes I honestly don’t understand how people can sit there and read it.

However, I will continue to write, and probably neglect my school work to do so, and possibly even flunk out of high school, all I really have time to worry about now is my mother because if I don’t nobody else will, and lately I suspect even with my precautions in place she may have started to abuse her anti-psychotics again, and in addition to that she keeps asking me over and over again when Kael’s coming here to visit us, or when we’re moving back home to live with him again. And honestly, I don’t have the will to tell her that we aren’t going home and Kael will most definitely not be coming here, but some piece of me is constantly worrying that he will find us, and what exactly he would do to me if he did.

I never realized how much my life was changing, from the day my father died, that is until I moved here and now I realize just how different everything is. Some of these things for the better and others for the worse, and yet the changes that are about to happen are going to be the most life altering, I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. This new town, this new school, these new people, the new rumors, the new drama, these changes will be the ones to make me into the person I wish to be, or break me into a million shards of glass. Either way, I have to be prepared for them, because if I’m not everything I’m working to achieve, all of my goals, they will pass me by, and I’ll be left alone, with nothing more then the pencil and notepad which I picked up at age 16 and the pitiful story of a musician that couldn’t take the heat, and then what will be I be, I’ll be nothing, I’ll be my Naive 13 year old self. And if I am my unchanging naive 13 year old self, then I don’t deserve to live. I deserve suffer the same fate that my father did, because someone like that doesn’t deserve to live. If I remain that person, I don’t deserve to be looking after my mother, I don’t deserve to have this second chance, I deserve to be sitting in this room, with my mother in the next. The television blaring the local news I deserve to remain entirely unchanging.

I deserve to be nothing.

End Prologue.

1: Heterochromia (also known as a heterochromia iridis or heterochromia iridium) is an eye condition in which one iris is a different color from the other (complete heterochromia), or where part of one iris is a different color from the remainder (partial heterochromia or sectoral heterochromia). It is a result of the relative excess or lack of pigment within an iris or part of an iris, which may be genetically inherited or due to mosaicism, or acquired by disease or injury. Source en. so it’s really short compared to the actual chapters, but that’s only because if I wrote anymore, it’d be really more like a ramble then a prologue, however, I’m only a quarter of the way through the first chapter and it’s about 10 pages long! So, the chapters are going to be exceptionally long.