Dear Creepypasta [#Wattys2016]

The one who comes before

The beginning of my story is a typical one; two young people in love – high school sweethearts – conceived a child out of wedlock. They married hastily, at the urgings of their parents, so that my mother wouldn't bring her family into 'disrepute'.
It stretches credulity that people once behaved that way, that something as simple as an unplanned child could cause social uproar. But it happened; and so my mother was rushed to hospital in the throes of labour, seven months after marrying my father.
Nothing went smoothly with my birth. My father often joked that I'd been a difficult child right from the beginning, but my mother's mouth pinched into a downturned moue whenever he mentioned that night.
I discovered much later that my heavily sedated mother gave birth via caesarean section – and when they handed the dazed woman her child, its newborn squalling displaying a mouth full of tiny teeth, she pushed me away. She claimed that I 'wasn't her baby', and insisted that I belonged to some other woman.
I found out the detail of that story when I was seven, going through my father's journals in the garage.
It didn't make me feel very good about myself.

As I grew, so did the schism between my mother and me. It was as if she had never quite shaken that feeling that I wasn't her child, and it wasn't helped at all by my behaviour. Both of my parents had been quiet and well-behaved as children, and neither of them could fathom how this fractious, disobedient and wilful creature had been conceived from their own flesh.
To add to that, my 'baby hair' never darkened into the oily brown that both of my parents possessed, and so I grew up white-blonde and surrounded by rumours that my father wasn't actually my father.
I'm not sure which of us that hurt the most, because he doted on me – as most fathers do upon their daughters – and I felt he was the only parent who loved me.
School was difficult. A natural daydreamer, I simply couldn't focus in the classroom. When the lunch bell rang, I was first out the door – and when it rang again to indicate that lunch was over, I was often far away from the school, poking around in a dumpster, or hiding in a secluded nook of the public library with a book full of fairytales.
I wasn't a bad kid. I just... lost track of things. I'd be so intent on what I was doing that time would spiral away, out of control, until I was suddenly being yelled at by my mother while she spanked my already bruised backside with a wooden spoon.
Eventually, my father bought me a fancy electronic watch for my tenth birthday. The little artificial chirrups would remind me every hour to check the time.
But that only solved one problem.

The name of the first boy was Danny Carmichael.
He'd put mud down the back of my neck in class, then slapped me between the shoulders to make it splatter all through my white school shirt.
The therapist told me that I didn't remember what happened because of the trauma, but I didn't feel traumatised when they explained what I had done. I felt happy that Danny got his dues for being such a little shit to me.
Apparently after I realised what he'd done, I stood up and kicked my chair backwards, right into his shins. While he howled in pain and clutched his legs, I calmly took off my muddy shirt, threw it over his head, then wrestled him to the floor and pulled it tight about his neck.
By the time the teacher intervened, Danny was a blubbering, muddy wreck, gasping for air and scrambling to get as far away from me as possible.
After two more incidents with other children, they put me on medication for my 'behavioural issues'.
But the therapist didn't address the real issue, because I didn't talk about it. My mother didn't think I was her baby, and my father was afraid that I wasn't his.
It's no wonder that a wristwatch and a bunch of pills couldn't fix me.

The meds took the edge off, but they couldn't fully quench the simmering chaos inside me. They switched me to another school after I managed to beat the everliving shit out of a bully in the year above me, pills or no pills.
I was told that I was on my last chance. The next stop would be a corrective boarding school.
Knowing that my mother would jump at the chance to send me away, I fought with myself and with my own natural impulses, trying desperately not to let the roiling emotions inside me boil to the surface again.
And so I became the recluse. The weirdo in the corner of the library, reading books about distant worlds where girls like me were heroes, not misfits. Labyrinth became a staple whenever my parents weren't home. I played it through so many times that the tape became stretched and the sound oddly warped, in that way that old VCR movies did. The music warbled and wavered uncertainly, and the coloured images fuzzed and flickered about the edges.
But children are cruel, and a target like me was irresistible.
The girl, Tamsin Rogers, had decided to instigate a sort of official girl-group ostracism of me, which initially backfired, because I couldn't have given two shits about their approval. But when they teased me in the PE changing rooms for still wearing a butterfly-spotted training bra at sixteen, that thing that lurked inside me crept malevolently over the edge of that brimming well of treacherous chaos.
Nobody really told me what happened, but the third degree burns on Tamsin's face and shoulders gave me a few clues. There was always one shower in the changing rooms that ran far too hot, and I think I probably held her face under the boiling torrent while she screamed and screamed in agony.
And so it was off to boarding school for me, along with a strictly monitored dose of heavier medications to damp the flash-fires of rage that kept surfacing.