Show the real you and you get burned.
"Why would you lie to me?" We're the first words uttered from Adriana's mouth.
"What are you talking about, honey." A sickly looking woman replied. Her eyes were sunken and she looked on the verge of death with bones poking through her yellowed flesh, and her clothes hanging limply on her dwarfish frame. Breathing came in short narrow gasps that ended with her wheezing heavily.
A tall man stood by her side, older than his true age. Years of drinking had robbed him of his youth. He wore clothes that did not suit his body texture and with a potbelly that poked beneath his shirt.
"What are you talking about?"
There it was, the question that had ruined her life. As if they did not know.
"Well Father, Mother. Or should I say Karen and Joe." Adriana spat out with venom seeping through her pours.
"Honey, what's going on?" That words sounded forced, no smoothness to blunten the edges.
"I'M ADOPTED? I'M BLOODY ADOPTED AND YOU TWO DISGUSTING EXCUSES OF HUMAN BEINGS MADE ME SUFFER A false life?" The monster of retribution reared its ugly head.
"W-wha-what on e-ear-earth are y-you talking about?" Karen stuttered as fear settled once again in her heart. If there was one thing she regreted in life, was taking Adriana out of the trashcan that started everything.
Her mind felt as if lead was coursing though it instead of blood. Her once lonely childhood memories of them now felt as if they were the air she breathed in.
"Everyday I would wake up and look into the mirror and ask myself, who am I? No one listened or answered back. I tried everything to gain your approval, but it was never enough. Was it?"
Something inside her snapped. Tarred, disfigured into something grotesque.
"You are the acid in what other
wise would be so heavenly. You revolt me. We're done. Done. Done."
"Karen stop apologising. The little bitch has finally gained some brains. We both know we never loved her. We just raised you to sell you off for some cash. From the moment we picked you out of that trashcan we knew there was nothing ordinary about you, look at you now. You a bombshell. Heck your more than a bombshell with your looks we could cash in more than a thousand dollars."
"You disgust me" Adriana whispered.
"Look at yourself. When have you ever smiled without mockery?" Karen demanded.
"Everytime I looked at you as a child I would regret. Regret the fact that we had not sold you right then and there, your eyes would stare at nothing and you would always claim you could see the dead!" By now she was in hysterics, eyes wide and bulging and a mechanical smile tearing her lips.
"Adriana. Alone and detested," Joe jeered. He started towards her and in a sing song voice full of malice he sang: "hide your tears, no one cares. Close your eyes and slowly die."
Give a man a mask and he becomes his true self. Take it away and he never was.