After.

*tweeeeeetweeeeee twit twit twit twit*

Anette sighed and continued to stare at the ceiling over her bed, watching it lighten as the morning’s first bands of sunlight began to creep into the room. Another restless night. She rose quietly and dressed quickly, small hands flying over the buttons of her ratty old dress. She didn’t want to see her “mother” on her way out the door if she wanted a shot at breakfast.

Little did she know, Kristen was already awake downstairs, cleaning the house as much as she could before heading to work.

Anette tiptoed down the stairs and peeped into the kitchen to see if she could grab an apple, but Kristen saw her first.

“Get out of here you little rat! You know you’re not allowed to touch anything in here!”

“But I’m hungry,” said Anette.

“You get plenty to eat, you’re getting fat already and when you came to us you were a shrimp. Now get out before I kick you out that door.”

Anette turned on her heel and scurried out. She knew better than to try bargaining with Kristen, and had the marks to prove it.

The autumn morning air was already heating up, and Anette’s face was flushed with sweat by the time she got to her school. The building sat like a grey lump on the ground, faceless except for the front door and a window above it. A metal sign beside the door read “SCHOOL FOR ABANDONED CHILDREN.” She joined the line of students waiting to enter under the shadow of a massive flag fluttering on the pole before the school.

The bell rang and the line snaked inside.

It happened in first period.

Martin Diaz was a 7th grader, two years older than Anette, and a quiet boy. He tested badly, spent recess alone, and that day, during the pledge of allegiance, Martin didn’t say anything. He stood up with the rest of the class, his left hand behind his back and his right in a salute and said... nothing. Mr. Diller, their reedy, spectacled teacher, was less than pleased.

“Diaz, why didn’t you say anything?” Diller drawled.

“I don’t know, sir” Martin mumbled.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“To learn, sir.”

“To learn what? Do you know WHAT I’m teaching you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He grabbed Martin by the ear, hard. Anette cringed.

“Boy,” spat Diller, “you’re here because your parents were stupid, low life, no good, lazy, thieving, cheating, worthless dissidents. Which makes you the spawn of terrorists. And MY job, is to prevent you from becoming a bottom feeding cretin like them.”

“They were not!” Martin cried. “They worked hard and they wanted to help people. They were good-” he broke off, blubbering.

Diller’s face went from puce to vermillion. He took a breath and lowered his voice, kneeling down to put a sweaty palm on Martin’s shoulder.

“Martin, if they wanted to help people, then why did they abandon you, their own son? If they were good people, wouldn’t God have chosen them to win the war, instead of us?” He turned to the class. “See now, this is why you’re all here. Your parents used to be like Martin- confused about what is right and wrong, self-pitying, bitter, too unpatriotic to praise the flag. And look how that turned out for them. They’re all dead, as every enemy of the state quickly becomes. And they left you behind, the refuse of a power grab masked as foolish idealism.”

He stood up and turned to the blackboard.

“Take a seat Martin, that’s enough. Class, thanks to Martin, today’s word of the day is,” the chalk swept across the board, “Insidious. Which means something that is slowly and subtly causing harm. A good example of something insidious would be the rise of the terrorists…”

His voice trailed off as Anette’s mind drifted away from the cruelty around her, and into her memory.

She was five again, and her mother’s fingers wove through her hair as her tongue wove long strings of conversation Anette could never understand, but could feel as if they were a net flung over her. Her Aunt Sue in one corner of the room and her father in another. She was beautiful, her mother, and always talking or reading or laughing or crying. Or writing. She had been writing a lot at the end. There were so many booklets and letters in their home. Of course that was all gone now. Everything was gone and she had lived with three families since then. She could barely remember her father’s face.

At lunch Anette had powdered milk and oatmeal with everyone else.

Anette’s walk back from school was boiling hot, and she took a different street to stay in the shade. This path was actually faster than her morning route, but she usually preferred to avoid it. The wall along the sidewalk was roughly six feet tall, started at the school and stretched almost a mile down the road. Made of glossy black granite, the wall was etched with the names of every person who had died in the civil war. That is everyone on the winning side. She averted her gaze but the names loomed at her anyways. At least the break from the sun was nice, she told herself.

Suddenly a car sped past and a man’s voice yelled “DISSIDENT BITCH!” as he leaned out and pelted something at her. She jumped away and fell into a patch of nettle. Disentangling herself from the bramble, she noticed that the stranger had thrown an apple. She wiped it off on her smock and ate around the bruises.

As she walked into the apartment complex where she lived, she noticed that there was a bird’s nest over the window of her room.

In her bed that night, Anette reached under her pillow and closed her fist around the one secret memento of her real family, a heart shaped locket on a chain meant for a small child. She felt hot tears stream down her cheeks and into her ears. “I know they were good,” she whispered, over and over again until she fell asleep.