Living with Untold Secrets

Prologue

I used to be someone.
Someone named Scarlett Miller.
That's what they tell me. But I am more than a name. More than they tell me. More than the facts and statistics they fill me with. More than the video clips they make me watch.

"Scarlett, Why don't you join me? Come, sweety, watch this. I am sure you don't want to miss this. It's a first after all. The first time a woman has travelled to Mars. Can you believe it?" The woman I am supposed to call my mother says. I don't remember her. I don't know her. I don't know what her favorite colour is or what kind of food she likes or even why she looks so guarded, closed like she has thick, unbreakable, impermeable cement walls full of secrets around her.

"A first," I say. I watch the monitor. They say it's called a television. They say our ancestors often used a primitive version of these devices. I watch my Mother's face. I've only just learned how to smile. I don't know how to match her other expressions. I should. Sometimes I feel lost and alone. I don't know what people's faces, expressions, reactions or even body-language is supposed to mean. I feel like a thorn in a garden of lotuses. Like a lone piece of dirty, filth-covered twig in an endless gush of clean, crystal water. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to interpret. I don't know what to think. I am empty from within. Like someone just collaborated and combined a bunch of organs and limbs and skin and muscles to make a creature. A creature who is supposed to be me. I don't know who I really am. What I really am.

"Mom, come sit with us," she calls out toward the kitchen. "It's about to start."

I know she won't come. She doesn't like me. I don't know how I know. Her face is as plain and expressionless to me as everyone else's. It is not her face. It is something else. But I don't know what.

"I'm doing a few dishes. I'll watch from the monitor in here," she calls back.

I stand. "I can leave, Lily," I offer.

She comes and stands in the arched doorway. She looks at Mother. They exchange an expression I try to understand. But as usual I fail. Being the desperate failure I am. Mother's face drops into her hands. "She's your nana, Jenna. You've always called her Nana."

"That's all right. She can call me Lily," she says and sits down on the other side of Mother, and I didn't fail to notice how far away she's sitting from me, maintaining a more than respectable distance.