Prologue

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Prologue

I was born sick.

What a way to begin, huh? Its blunt, to the point, basically just a smack in the face, but that's how my mother always began my story, back when I was young and impressionable and still going through some of the hardest times of my life.

'Aerin was born sick, that's why we lock him in his bedroom closet.'

There'd always been a hollow warble to her voice when she'd said it, a melancholy marked in lowered eyelashes and embarrassed scarlet. Oh, sure, people used to flock around her in droves, offering sympathy and condolences, and her handkerchief would always be black from dobbing at her mascara run-eyes, but nobody ever really noticed the gleam in them.

Yes, that gleam... the gleam that always told me how much she thrived off being the center of attention... but I'm getting way ahead of myself. Let's start with me rather than my extensive mommy issues, shall we?

My name is Aerin Vanderhill, and I am what many people would call a trap.

Not the kind of trap you get stuck in, or the kind that you lay out for someone... I'm the kind of 'trap' that makes people think you're one thing when you're really another. In this case, people assume I'm a girl because I look and sound like one.

A gender trap.

Don't get me wrong, I don't full-on cross dress or anything like that and I most certainly don't try to fool people, I just happened to get the luck of the draw with my genetics. I was born with a girl's body shape, face, shoulder size, everything... well, everything but the chest and, below, if you get my meaning, but I'm perfectly fine with it since I'm gay.

Yep. You did read that right.

Gay.

As in the finger snapping 'Yasss, bitch, I'm a QUEEN!' kind of gay. So in a way, there were actually two closets I was forced to live in. The irony, right? I'm not ashamed of who I am, but back when I was younger it was one of the many, many reasons I was called 'sick' by the people around me.

Reality is complicated. The fact, however, isn't.

I wasn't born sick, or even gay, I was born blue.

Doctors call it hypoplasia when an internal organ doesn't develop properly; a kidney, a liver, a brain, or, as it was for me, a lung. I started dying the minute they cut me out of my mother's uterus. Proper "the charge paddles aren't fucking working!" type of dying. The machines beeped, the beeps panicked, and the doctors lost their shit because panicking was supposed to be their job.

"Charge! Clear! Clear! Fucking clear!"

Aural pandemonium, visual mayhem, and silence from me, the newborn that had stopped breathing. I'd been pronounced dead three times before I was stabilized. I used to figure it was something of a record, albeit not the type anyone really wants to know about since not even Guinness was interested, but then again, they had a man who suffered twelve consecutive heart attacks in one afternoon so being a hat-trick-Zombie baby pales a little in comparison to that.

I don't take it personally.

Either way, they did everything they could and got my heart going somehow because back then I was actually wanted by my parents, and their money sure as hell talked.

Only, after the delivery-room dramatics, the doctors discovered that there was something very wrong with me and I was soon diagnosed with an extremely slow and unstable pulse due to heart complications and, worst of all, a genetic condition called Porphyria. In English this basically translates to: "Frail and allergic to sunlight. Please keep out of reach of a proper life."

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