Sorry this took so long! I got busy with some other projects and temporarily forgot about this, so it took me way longer than it should have. ~ First: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/854964808/ Previous: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/854964808/ Next: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/869068873/ ~ Age rating: 11+ (basically just as long as you're a mature reader) ~ The villains aren’t meant to enter Seabrook. It is a place for the heroes, the ones who believe in happiness and love and kindness. They are meant to be sweet as sugar and harmless until you hurt someone they love. They are the kind of people that I was raised to hate, like a proper villain. I had spent day after day gazing out the window across the lake to the town on the other side when Mother hadn’t been watching me. Perhaps I was always the villain that she wanted me to be. A liar. Rebellious. Refusing to follow the rules because they didn’t suit me. By another’s definition, I might be exactly who I was meant to be. Em was perfect in every way, if you asked me. She had wide eyes of amber and auburn hair that fell in gentle waves like the way the ocean would ripple after a stone was dropped into it. But Em wasn’t the kind of hero who would sit tight and do what her elder told her to do, like me, in a way. She was all fire and all storm, and her words were easily sharper than knives. I first saw her when I had ventured out to the Woods, the piece of land that separated good from evil, wicked malice from graceful mercy. She looked so out of place in such a dark and dank forest, which contrasted so with the crystalline water and sandy banks of Seabrook, where she was meant to be. Em was used to winning, used to not having to worry about her future, so she sought out adventure and danger, like every hero should. Like me, she was the person that Seabrook had molded her to be and yet an entirely different one from it at the same time. Em had had her legs crossed tightly as she stared off into apparent nothingness, twirling a small stray pebble between her pointer and thumb. That was the day I met her. Boredom and adventure had brought us both together, and the girl in the Woods had seemed like she needed a friend. Instead of scrambling back when I had found her, she had merely said, “I’ve never seen a hero with your hair before.” She was unembarrassed and unfazed, despite how I had felt a sudden thrill of both fear and excitement when I noticed that it wasn’t just me who had decided to take a walk in the Woods that day. Self-consciously, I had picked up a strand of my ebony black hair and looked at it. /I’m not a hero/, is what I had thought, once the initial shock had passed. But then, I realized, /maybe I’m not, but now I have a chance to become one/. I could become the person which the universe would never let me be, at least with the girl who sat before me. Now, looking back, I see how it destroyed me, piece by piece, bit by bit. When her piercing gaze searched my own for the answers that she wanted, I held it fiercely and told her, “Never seen one who broke the rules so shamelessly either.” She had replied in a sing-song voice, “I guess we can be rulebreakers together,” and glanced back at Seabrook over her left shoulder. And then she smiled at me. I had thought that it would be so easy to create a new person, but I was so wrong. So, so wrong. I was never meant to be the hero. But at the time, I was none the wiser, so when she grinned at me, I grinned right back.
