Chapter Text
Nothing had prepared me, not books, not teachers, not even my parents. I had heard a thousand stories, yet none could describe that thing. You have to encounter it, live with it, pass through it to understand it. I live with it now, and yet I understand it even less than before.
Death. To know it and survive it, you must walk with it, bleed in its flesh, drown in its own rivers until its name becomes clear.
That is an odd thing, death. It consumes you, stronger than hunger or fear or anything I have ever felt. I feel it everywhere : in my hands, my stomach, my toes…
Every night, the whole world fades away. No more stars or moon. No sky at all. No earth beneath my feet. No rock against my back. There are only us : me and the demons of my mind.
My hell began the day my family died, when joy, a small, stubborn thing, fiercely alive, was taken from us.
They shot my little brother and me first. He died after a few minutes. He looked at me like a little man, brave, protective, and I understood that he had defied death so it would take him in my place.
My mother was killed instantly. My father, a bullet to the head.
That is what the adults tell me.
I remember nothing. Not that day, nor the life I had before. Only my brother’s courage remains in my memory.
Six bullets tore through my small body that day. No one truly knows how I survived. The steel left no mark on my face, only on my skull, beneath my hair, along my neck and across my chest. Each scar hidden, silent enough never to be spoken of.
I have always been angry that I cannot remember my past, that I have forgotten my parents’ faces.
The doctors say it’s because of the trauma and the bullet that passed through my skull, like my father’s.
Some say it’s a blessing to have forgotten them, because you can’t grieve for those you no longer remember.
After months in the hospital, I grew up in a children’s home in Queens, far from what I would once have called a home. No one came to get me. It was probably just us: my mother, my brother, and me.
I have lived in my own hell ever since. Miss Rawlins, my guardian, look after me every day. She teaches me languages and mathematics and always repeats that one must not speak of the dead, that I must keep my distance from the world, because the outside world did not want me.
I do not like Miss Rawlins very much. She is harsh and cold. She offers no comfort. And she gives me nothing but old books for distraction.
I am never allowed to go out, except into the courtyard. I know nothing of what has happened beyond these walls for five years. Perhaps I was too sad to want to know. Now I am simply angry.
To survive here, I think I have become a stranger to my past, maybe a monster too, in full freedom. It's the only way of accepting the consequences of this life, embracing them, wrapping them around me like a blanket each night.
I am very lonely. I have no friends here. Love is a risk my heart no longer wishes to take.
Today is an important day, I think. I turned sixteen.
That is what Miss Rawlins wrote in my notebook. As a gift, she slapped me when I refused to silence my name.
She has called me “Rose” since I arrived here. I know that is not my name.
So, I lifted my head and told her.
“My name is Lisa. I know cause it was engraved on the necklace I wore that day. My name was covered in my blood. You stole it from me. I know you did. Liar. You’re a liar!”
That was when she slapped me. Then she nervously rolled up her sleeve and fixed me with contempt.
“Existence has no interest in you. No matter what your name is.”
Another memory came to me then, there, painted on the wall. A soldier, a giant, clumsily drawn by hand. A Marine, perhaps, like in the history books, proud and protective, murmuring words I imagined were my father’s : “If you fail to beat your demons, you will drown. If you get too close to the snake, you will be bitten. If you are too weak, you will be eaten. If you stay proud and brave, maybe you can find a way to survive.”
Miss Rawlins can take everything from me. But she cannot erase the shadow of those who loved me. She cannot steal my power to create, to assemble, to think my story, to give it sound, images or colors
My name is Lisa. I know it. And I have the heart of a soldier.
I have known death since I was a child. It is everywhere. But it has never killed me. It has only laid its rotten finger on my heart.
And today, my eyes are wide open.
Miss Rawlins eventually turned her back on me and left me alone. I wandered in circles until I found a newspaper behind her desk. It did not look old and dusty like my books. I took it in my hands, and my fingers ran over the paper with an impatience I had never known in this life.
It is called The Bulletin. I read it for an entire hour, and it was the best birthday I have had in five years.
Today, I saw the world through the eyes of a stranger who gave it back all its colors: Karen Page. Today, on my sixteenth birthday, a woman I have never met saved me with new words I once believed were forbidden. Justice, Freedom, Vengeance.
The editorial made me want, at once, to stop being weak. To fight, even if I do not yet know against whom, or against what.
“Is this America? Where is freedom when innocent people are killed and the system fails to respond? Where is justice? We are sheep without a shepherd. Maybe, for once, we need to rise up and follow the wolves of the night. Vigilantes. Soldiers. Are they heroes? Maybe not. What does it matter? They protect us from the night. They allow us to survive in this place, this hell where, at every corner, a new monster waits to devour us.”
One by one, I discovered the stories of men and women, the forgotten, the damned, ordinary people who became extraordinary simply to survive or to protect one another.
Unlike the paper in my hands, life outside was not made only of black and white. It was made of thousands of colors. It was not silent. It roared, rumbled, and rebelled on every side.
I turned the pages. I read. Again. Again. Perhaps hoping to find my own story there.
It was not there.
I found the story of a masked vigilante who had brought down a man named Wilson Fisk. He seemed to embody the devil, and yet it was the masked man who was called here the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
Then I read about another man. No mask. A soldier, I think. The story said he had lost everything, and that for it he shed blood and reduced the worst gangs of New York to ashes.
Maybe killing was wrong. But in that moment, I chose to believe it might be a necessity. I hope that man will kill those who stole my mother’s smile.
At last, I placed the newspaper back behind Miss Rawlins’s desk.
And I thought.
I, too, want to know the story of my name in those pages. I want to know why the world hides from me and why these walls hide me from it.
My name is Lisa. I know nothing else.
My life was taken from me years ago. I know that a single decision can change its course forever, and I do not know if that decision will be the one that gives it back to me.
Death circles around me. So I must be very, very careful what I choose to do.
But justice and freedom are everything I need.
If I run away, then maybe I can find this Karen Page. Maybe, with her help, I can choose life again, and maybe it will choose me in return.
My name is Lisa. And this is my story.