Page 3 of Euphoria
2
It all beganthe day my parents died.
I was too young to remember them, but later, I was told they’d died in a car accident. A lonely road, a sharp turn, and a disaster for all but one.
When a local farmer happened upon the scene, he found a swaddled baby in the back seat with not a single scratch on her fragile skin. When help could be found and the wreckage taken away, she’d been left in the care of the hospital for the evening until the next of kin could be contacted.
If my family had a name, I was unaware what it was. For as long as I could remember, my name was Jane Doe. The name the law gave to those who had no identity or no discernible way of finding one. I was no one.
My uncle Reed cared for me at first and doted perhaps a little too much. When I was three years old, he passed away from a heart attack, and I was left to endure with my aunt Sarah and my cousins, John and Georgiana.
From that moment forth, my aunt constantly told me I was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. My parents and her ungrateful husband had the audacity to die and leave their demon child in her care. I was a burden who sucked the soul from her life, and in its place, her dalliance in substance abuse couldn’t sooth the blow.
Reed was not my name and never would it be. My mother was my uncle’s sister and had married what Aunt Sarah described as a vagrant, and that was all I knew. My past was withheld from me, my despicable adoptee mother the gatekeeper and she made it her mission to belittle the memory of my parents. Not that I had any memory aside from daydreams and fantasies I dared to experience whilst hiding from my cousins.
The Reeds were rich enough that their fine manor house had room for a family three times the size of what we were, but I was prescribed the smallest room in the house, the castoff clothes of my cousin Georgiana, and a list of chores a mile long. My education suffered, I did not go to school, all ignored me, and when there was need of a scapegoat, I was blamed for every mistake that happened within the confines of the house.
Compared side by side with my cousins, I was plain, undersized for my age, my skin was pale, and I always looked sickly. I had no talents to speak of and no prospects outside of the house, and I was reminded of it every day without fail.
Little Jane Doe was the runt of the litter. Useless, unwanted, despised, a blight on the house of Reed.
Some souls start to believe what others say they are if they’re told it often enough. Was it because their mind was weak? Or was it because the pressure of despair was so great they crumbled under the weight of it? I didn’t know. All I was certain of was my story.
And how did the tale of poor, plain, unwanted, Jane Doe end? Well, I suppose I resorted to extremes just to spite Aunt Sarah and her bully son.
Simply put, I fought. Tooth and nail, hammer and tong. One day, when I was eight-years-old, I had reached my limit of pinches, slaps, and brutish thuggery John delighted in exacting upon me, and I put my plain, little fist straight into his piggy, little nose so hard it bled all over Aunt Sarah’s best rug. He ran off crying like the little squealer he was, and of course, all of it was my fault.
I was locked in a closet for three days as punishment for my misdemeanor.
When the door finally opened, I was dragged away to yet another miserable existence. Being a eight years old, I didn’t have much choice in the matter, so off I went.
That’s how I found myself enrolled at Lowood, the school designed to teach problem children how to walk on the straight and narrow and be upstanding citizens of the world.
They took me kicking and screaming from that closet, and it was in that moment of total abandonment that I realized I was in this life alone. The love and care I’d craved all my life was not in the cards for a child such as me, so I let go of such foolish notions and embraced the harsh nature of real life. From there on out, I didn’t count on anyone but myself.
I never saw the Reeds again, and as the days passed into years and hardships came and went, I began to think less and less of them until I had little regard for their memory.
I’d been mistreated, beaten, and scorned by those who should have been family, so perhaps I had every right to rue the day my parents were taken from this world and my name was withheld from me, but I saw Lowood as a chance to make something of myself. If only I had known what trials the next ten years would contain, I might’ve run away, but I felt spirit within me. Spirit which bade me to endure, so endure I did.
Lowood was brutal, and the stench of misery had forced a callous to grow over all the softness and wonder my parents had passed on when they made me. I grew into a hardened woman, intelligent and determined yet closed and cold, and the moment I could leave that place, I did.
I imagined a world bigger than all I had experienced and believed with all my heart there was a place for a nameless woman like me. I was keen to find adventure outside of the halls of Lowood, and adventure I found.
Five years I traveled the country, seeking meager work that paid enough for me to skip to the next city, and then to the next. I experienced life, lust, and sinful desires, and still, I floated aimlessly in the waters of life, not knowing where I belonged—if I did at all.
And that, reader, was how I found myself quite literally at a crossroads. The total darkness of the moor shrouding my presence as I made the trek from a tiny English village to yet another beginning.
The wind tore at my hair as I pulled my hoodie up over my head to keep warm, the duffel bag that held all of my earthly belongings thrown carelessly across my back. The sky was dotted with a million stars, the desolate landscape only serving to make me feel small and alone in a world that was bigger than I could ever imagine.
The lone light that winked in the distance—a beacon in an otherwise bleak future—was from a grand, dilapidated manor turned hotel, which I was told was in need of some tender loving care. They hired me upon my application, and the wage was acceptable, so I came.
It was to be the place of my beginning and end.
Thornfield.
