a small excerpt to build up my OC's back story
Ever since she was small enough to wriggle through that gap in the fence that made Farmer Abernathy turn puce, Aiyana knew her mother didn't like her very much. Most kids take it for granted. My mama loves me, a little too much some might say, but I deal with it. That concept was foreign. The idea of hearing Mama calling for her across the field, so angry her voice was a growl - because that's how you knew it was love, real love - was bizarre. Actual love wasn't lukewarm. It burned red when a loved one wasn't accounted for. She'd heard that tone in the voices of her friend's moms. Not her own.
Mama was the colour blue if there was ever a person invented for the shade.
What'd you do to her? Aiyana asked grandma once (it made sense to go back up the food chain).
Weren't me. It was your Daddy.
No way. Daddy wouldn't do that.
That always made grandma laugh. Aiyana had more faith in a man she'd never known than the two women she did.
She only had one photograph of him, caramel-skinned and green-eyed, laughing so loud every single one of his teeth was a pearl in the sunlight. He was a mix of Mississippi white, Choctaw and Indian (the real kind of Indian over in the east). But there was no telling. He could have been anything. Just like Aiyana and Mama, who were whatever took Grandma's fancy at the time.
Before Aiyana was born, Grandma claimed she was Choctaw. No one questioned her. She looked native and she had just enough grasp on the Choctaw language. But when Mama met Daddy, suddenly she wasn't Choctaw anymore because he was. Then she was Cherokee, then Chickasaw and then Seminole. Aiyana stopped questioning it.
Her grandma definitely belonged to one of them, but no one ever told her which, or wrote her name down in a registry and stamped her with an identity. Her mother left her on the doorstep of a church. Aiyana suspects she was white if she did that, especially if the affair with her great-grandpa was a secret. But she doesn't say it out loud. Grandma would have a fit. Deep down, Grandma probably knows, because she made sure to go for a native man herself and that was how Mama came about. She would never say what tribe he was from though, or if he even told her.
And then Mama spun her own little lies - she was the daughter of a chief, she was descended from a Sugpiaq princess - but they didn't make her feel like she belonged either. Grandma never made any real effort to try and integrate with the local tribe, though they were kind to them in passing.
Aiyana always suspected her family liked the feeling of isolation. Of being so special, they were forced onto a loftier perch. She didn't understand it. She wanted so badly to be part of something, she got caught up in all sorts, including a local Amish community that didn't really know what to do with her as a kid except let her play with theirs. But the second she got to about 12, that was over. Some of the flaxen-haired boys were staring a little too hard.
Back then that's how she thought people got pregnant. Daddy stared at Mama too hard and I was born.
She catches Grandma looking at her sometimes, as if figuring out what went wrong. Aiyana doesn't look much like her or her daughter. Grandma had to learn to love the features of the man whose name she won't allow mention of in the house because she saw them every day. Mama didn't bother.
Everything Aiyana ever wanted that was bad for her, if Mama was the sole authority in the house, she'd murmur sure, go ahead and go back to brushing her blue-black hair. In the end, she found herself a rich white man from Georgia and he didn't care what his family had to say about his choice of wife. He carted both Mama and her little girl to his mansion and Grandma was left behind.
At seventeen, Aiyana hitchhiked her way back. She wouldn't tell Grandma what her stepfather did - or wanted to do - because it would ruin Mama's happiness which she barely had much of to begin with. Grandma would blame her for not watching what was happening to her own daughter.
Mama called more than usual in those first months. She wouldn't ask about Aiyana's daily life. She'd tell her about all the soirƩes and garden parties and peach-picking picnics in an attempt to lure her daughter back. But then she got pregnant and the phone calls tapered off. She sent a picture of the little creature and Aiyana squinted at it until her vision turned blurry. He was bright pink and blonde and blue-eyed. She wondered if Mama was a real person. None of the kids she made came out looking like her, as if she wasn't there to begin with.
She had no real interest in her brother once she learned they named him Alexander. Their family didn't produce Alexanders. He wasn't one of them, he wasn't a girl. The XY gene meant he'd skipped the curse altogether.
If it was possible, Grandma hated Alexander's father more than she hated Aiyana's. At least he'd left her daughter to her and given her a grandchild to raise. Mama invited her to come meet her grandson but Grandma never did.
She was much too busy keeping an eye on her granddaughter, working out when she'd have to start worrying. If a man's voice was heard too close to the house, she'd be out on the porch, squinting through her one good eye, hand on the shotgun across her knees. Aiyana had seen her use it. She was a deadshot. She was very careful not to bring anyone she really liked near the place.
And then there was him, the new sheriff in town, the one with as ambiguous an identity as theirs. No one knew where he came from, or why. No family, no real roots, nothing. One day he was just there, with his pale eyes and shark teeth, and Aiyana knew her grandmother would shoot him on sight if she ever let slip that she liked to look at him.
Grandma was always good at sniffing out a predator.