She had always grown up in a persistent layer of dirt. No one could quite pinpoint the exact shade of her skin, but she proclaimed it to be the fiery green scales of a dragon. And for a long time, the children believed her. Her dirtiness was an acute side-effect of her curiosity, a thing born when she was a tad under three and utterly in love with the art of insects and how certain kinds could be digested.
That was then, but now the nuns, the ones who ran her all-girl elementary, (the school was clearly tagged “purgatory” with black sharpie in the bathroom stall, but no one had been proven to that crime) had taken a particularly large stack of wet wipes to her with a viciousness that would scare most silly. Sister Albagene was bitter from the top of her habit-ed head to the soles of her ugly brown shoes. The sister held her down while she thrashed and the others wiped her clean until her skin was pink from stress and the tips of her ears scarlet from a burning anger festering within. It was that day that the other children discovered that she wasn’t really green, but instead a pale alabaster similar to a salamander that had never seen the sun.
There was a soft whisper hushed over the tar-black playground murmuring that her mother was the homeless woman on Third Street who had a bad habit of talking to herself. Also, that her father was a rich, oil tycoon who had never wanted a child, especially not a girl, for god’s sake. “Only half of that is true,” she would strut about proclaiming, a suspiciously broken jump-rope hanging from the crook of her arm, “and I certainly will not say which.”
The girl found it strange that so much dependency stood upon who her parents were or even if she had parents. For a satisfactory moment, she felt such a stench of satisfaction because she had outsmarted them by means of philosophy and logic, something the nuns didn’t pride themselves very much upon. They were always ranting about “Jesus” this and “Jesus” that, constantly asking “what would Jesus do?” In the sixth grade, when the girl finally got so annoyed with the nuns’ pestering bird- like voice, she answered the age-old question with: “Hell if I know! Everything he did got him killed.” It was scrubbing the hulking wooden alter after school from then forward.
It was in the soft shades of autumn that the girl met her worst enemy and soon-to-be dearest friend. The girl, who had claimed her name was Sticker with such insistence that the nuns gave up, was all freckles with a mop of bleach blonde hair sprawling out in an outrageously wild manner. Sticker seemed to always be ratting out the others to Sister Gremelda and herding the nose-pickers and floor- lickers, the children no one had ever taken a fondness to, under her utterly white wings.
Sticker found her the perfect target and often tattled to the nuns whatever she was doing; be it brushing her teeth incorrectly to bullying the second graders to treat her as their goddess-queen. The girl cornered Sticker one day between the ancient books in the library, a determined glare in her grey eyes, wanting to know why the girl was such a pest and when she would let up on being a constant reporter to the sisters.
The girl watched in intense horror as Sticker broke down into thick tears, fits of sobbing, that contorted her face into that of a Halloween mask. It was so awful that the girl couldn’t find it in her to laugh and evacuate the premises, instead she knelt next to the girl and attempted to comfort her. It was an awkward experience and did not end, to the girl’s terror, until Sticker admitted that her mother and father had decided upon sending her to stay at the school until their divorce was settled and done with.
The words, crumpled up inside the girl, tumbled out in a huff as she told Sticker how her father, the richest man in the United States, had simply left her there one night, like the scene out of a sad movie. She had overheard the nuns whispering like school-girls about how her heartbroken father had told them of her mother’s untimely death and how his daughter would not be safe with him anymore, that she needed a home faraway. The man had never returned nor called and all the searching in the world on her laptop recorded no memory of him, as if he had never existed at all.
Except one thing, one sorry floating detail curdled all plans of ever forgetting that she even had a father—the money delivered each month, the fortune in the bank under her mysterious name that she inherited from a nonexistent father. The nuns had allowed her to change her name to that of a saint’s to “allow her further closeness with the God”, a lie that had spouted too easily from her lips, but she had found it strange to carry a first and last name bestowed to her from a person that had never even wanted her around.
She and Sticker became thicker than thieves, being the only two girls to room at the actual school. After two years of the divorce settling, burnt up like ashes until neither parent had enough money to keep disagreeing with one another, they sent for Sticker, now thirteen with a little too much attitude for her own good, to come home.
Sticker, being one of those cursed human beings prone to crying in sad situations, sobbed a river and then some, including bawling out her eyes for hours and threatening with a devious little twist to herlips that she would hold her breath until she certainly died. That, on the manner, did not work out the way she expected it to.
Her mother, a tall woman wearing even taller shoes, tottered in one day and practically all but attacked her with a barrage of complicated words. It was as if she was attempting to win an award for how many she could use in one sentence, and was winning. She then turned to the girl, Sticker’s practical sister, and exclaimed how she didn’t want her precious daughter in the company of some mud- haired little rat. She left soon after that, pulling Sticker along, all the while blabbering on to someone on the other end of her sophisticated smart-phone.
The girl thought that her world was over, that the next worse thing to happen would be WWIII and even that wouldn’t be half as bad. She had lost her only friend, and in the process of becoming Sticker’s best friend, she had lost all chances of befriending the other girls whom were now taken. She almost teared up, almost, but before she could shame herself even more, rotten Sister Albagene presented her with her own phone. It was something they had been waiting to give her when she had gained “respect” for others and “dignity by the Lord”—two qualities the girl certainly thought she did not posses, but accepted the gifts with a marvel. The sisters showed her how she could insert Sticker’s number into her contact list and how she could even “face-time” her to see her face. The girl even mustered up all her courage she had ever had in her entire life and kissed Sister Albagene on the cheek.
Having the phone allowed the girls to chat relentlessly about everything from the sky to Sticker’s new environment with boys and how she had never knew a creature could smell so bad. They prattled on all day, separated only by school and homework, and soon devised up a plan for Sticker to return to the school for high school which had a formal dormitory. It would involve a lot of pleading on Sticker’s part, more of her crying nonsense, and a lot of troublesome behavior - but before she would pull it off, she would have to get her parents into a row again.
While Sticker waited for her parents to fall into another daze of fighting, the girl researched every data base possible and emailing every person who had ever even mentioned the missing billionaire’s name. She spent hours examining blurry photos taken by his previous company (something with a name containing a long stream of capitals) and even ones at a distance; him cutting the ribbon at an opening of a business center in Hong Kong, another at an Opera House shaking the hand of a famous baritone in Rome, but none were good enough resolution where you could see the man in the photo. Once, when it was very late at night, she imagined that his hair was brown like hers and that he was just as pale, but, the next morning when she scoured the internet for the same photograph, it was gone.
The whole situation grew more and more confusing when the nuns refused to answer her questions and almost drew out their dusty rulers to whack her when they discovered that she was searching for her father. The girl bided her time, dividing it between conspiring with Sticker and desperately looking for leads on her father. When Sticker called that night her face alight with excitement as she explained that her parents had agreed to send her there for high school, the soft green of the girl’s computer-video-camera clicked on once then twice before clicking off completely. The girl dismissed it without a second thought.
She soon tired of searching without any information turning up. So, like any normal teenager, she cooked up a plan to break into the nun’s office where they kept each girl’s records with all of their information. It would be as easy as sneaking out while they dozed. Opening the door, the only tools she needed were a flashlight and her camera.
Towards the time of night when she was usually deciding that it would be a good idea to at least start her homework, she snuck down the hallway, the only viewers of her future crime the various paintings of the Madonna and child, the baby Jesus laughing at her from within the hay. The office was squeezed between the church and green house, a skinny room with 70s style desks pushed up against lemon yellow walls. Below a calendar depicting Mother Theresa, was the taupe-colored filing cabinet.
Feeling tense, the girl glanced at the door before pulling open the drawer and rifling through the files. No, she thought panicked, what if they removed it, knowing my plans? Shaken from her anxiety, she saw her name printed in a hard text, the strange pattern of last name, first name. She pulled it with shaking fingers and opened it up, the paper sliced the tip of her finger, inside was a page with her photo, her name listed, height, weight, date of birth, and the other necessary identification. Annoyed, she flipped the page to find it blank, and went through the other papers to find them also empty of anything other than her permanent record and grades.
Devoid of hope, and convinced that the people she had known her entire life were hiding her father from her, she put the file back and hurried back to her room. In the darkness, she felt claustrophobic and filled with exhaustion...she stared at the ceiling until the morning came.
Jolted from her sleep, her phone, chirped at from her bedside table. With a groan, she rolled over and accepted the incoming call from Sticker. Without thinking, she confessed her entire plan to her and how it had failed. Sticker grinned at the mystery and agreed that every which way about it was the strangest occurrence.
This, the girl thought aloud, was practically only one of the strangest things happening. It was as if the nuns knew her deeds yet did not bring it up to her, expect choosing to become more quiet and distant as if scared. Also, the photos and websites she had linked to her father were becoming harder and harder to find, disappearing off the seemingly invisible map.
Sticker began to blabber on about her excitement and how she was so happy to be returning to her childhood home, but the girl suddenly found her obnoxious. Can’t she see how my life is changing so suddenly? Can she not understand my discomfort with the fact that all my links to my father are becoming transparent?
The girl sat up, still listening to Sticker, and pushed her hair from her face in an attempt to detangle it. She watched as Sticker gestured wildly with her arms about some adventure they were going to have until the girl saw it, out of the corner of her eye. Behind Sticker, was a black faceless monster- like figure approaching at a quick pace.
Confused, the girl blinked, “Sticker, I thought you said your dad wasn’t going to be home for a couple of hours.”
Sticker stopped, “I told you that he wasn’t, wha—”
The girl would never know what else Sticker would say because she snapped forward with an awful twisting sound. She screamed and watched as Sticker slumped and her phone’s camera depicted her mass of blonde fluff, the lip of her neck, and a large tranquilizer dart protruding from her brown freckles.
In horror, the girl watched in shocked silence while the attacker stooped down looking directly into the lens. His face was that of a bulldog’s with pouchy skin hanging like jowels off the narrow bones of his chin and cheekbones. There was a sort of muted blue to his eyes and his head was bald, shiny, with scrawling black dragons circling his ears.
The girl couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, her best friend had just been shot and here she was, face to face with the bastard that had done it. For a strange moment she thought back to when she had told everyone that her skin was that of a dragon. It made her shudder.
The man looked at the girl and smiled grimly, “Hello, little bitter girl, little Mara.”
Her name, Mara,She remembered learning of the origin, that her father had named her "bitter". Just the syllables clicked together made bile clasp in her throat.

Mara watched in horror as the screen clicked... dark. Black. Gone.

“Why?” She whispered in the darkness. Mara looked up at the ceiling, “Why have you done such
a thing?” There was no reply, but silence and she wept and wept.